Energy and exergy analyses of multigenerational integrated systems with geothermal and solar energy sources

Abstract

The world population growth leads to a large demand of the different forms of energy. The challenges will be focusing on the discovery of new technologies that will satisfy to the demand and the production of energy that will have less impact to the environment. The global warming is now a real issue. The sustainability concept of producing energy has become a priority for many countries. Utilizing advanced technologies to increase the efficiency of producing energy by using renewable sources is now the new direction that many industries are taking to minimize their operating costs and maximize their profits without rapidly arming the environment. Among these technologies, they are multigeneration processes which are considered as a stand-alone system that is capable of producing multiple forms of energy at high efficiencies and low emission of the pollutant in the environment. In this project, a multigenerational integrated systems is considered and analyzed for both energy and exergy. The geothermal and solar energy sources are used to produce electricity, cooling, heating and fresh distillate water through the desalination of seawater. From the steam rankine power cycle, the system is able to supply 25 MW of power. Through the absorber chiller, the system is able to produce a cooling load of 7329 kW. The cooling area can be calculated from the cooling load, the overall heat transfer coefficient (obtained from the insulation material used on the building) the inlet and outlet temperatures of the cooling space. The system generates a heat load of 3049 kW and 7021 m3/day of fresh distillate water. The overall energy and exergy efficiencies of the system is 22.83% and 13.02% respectively.