The serious energy supply problems along with the conventional resources depletion and the environmental conscience regarding global warming and climate change, have urged the need for a complete change in the energy production, supply and consumption patterns. Therefore, the switch towards renewable energy resources including solar, biomass, wind, hydro-power in addition to the development of energy efficient technologies are two key factors to attain a secure and reliable energy sector and to mitigate the global warming problem. Tri-generation is one of the most promising technologies allowing the efficient simultaneous production of heat, coolth and power with potential technical, economic and environmental benefits. [n this work, an innovative micro-scale hybrid solar-biomass tri-generation system was theoretically and experimentally investigated to provide cooling, heating and power generation in buildings. The proposed tri-generation system consists of an organic Rankinebased combined heat and power unit, a liquid desiccant dehumidification unit and a dew point evaporative cooling unit. To offset recent problems associated with small-scale ORC expanders including high cost, excessive fluid leakage and low isentropic efficiency, a novel compact and low-cost moditied scroll expander was employed in the organic Rankine unit for heat and power generation. In addition, an efficient and compact liquid-desiccant unit coupled with a dew point evaporative cooler was utilized to provide the additional cooling capacity through air dehumidification and cooling. Moreover, a novel hollow fibre-based core was proposed in this thesis to provide thermal comfort and humidity control lIsing a ho))ow fibre contactor with mUltiple bundles of micro-porous ho))ow fibres. The proposed core was developed and tested as a cooling core and dehumidification core in the Built Environment Laboratory. An extensive theoretical and experimental investigation of the micro-scale tri-generation system was carried out to model, design, develop and test the system different sub-units under various operational conditions. It was shown that using a heat input of about 19.6 kW, the micro-scale tri-generation system is capable of providing about 9.6 kW heating, 6.5 kW cooling and about 0.5 kW electric power. The overall efficiency of the combined cooling, heating and power system is about 84.4%.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:659291 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Jradi, Muhyiddine A. |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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