Thermal energy is an important resource for many industrial processes and is usually produced by combustion of hydrocarbon fuels with air. These processes could beneficiate from the use of oxygen-enhanced combustion (OEC), whose benefits (pollutants emissions reduction, fuel savings, productivity increase and volumes reduction) are already known. However, low costs oxygen production is still a challenge as the currently most used technique, cryogenics, is very energy consuming and costly. So, the present work proposes the thermodynamic analysis of two different techniques for production of oxidant required for the OEC process, the first one including air separation by polymeric membrane and the second one by PSA. Both systems were simulated on the software EES. Results show an increase of the energetic efficiency in both of the systems (from 22% to 58% in the membrane case and 66% in the PSA case) and of the exergetic efficiencies (from 18% to 48.5% and 54% respectively). A reduction of more than 60% of specific pollutants emissions was shown. The assessed techniques were shown to be energetically more attractive than cryogenics for small plants, the size limit depending on operating conditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-116574 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Gosselin, Gaëlle |
| Publisher | KTH, Kraft- och värmeteknologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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