The escalating energy prices and the increasing environmental impact posed by the
industrial usage of energy have spurred industry to adopt various approaches to
conserving energy and mitigating negative environmental impact. This work aims at
developing a systematic approach to integrate solar energy into industrial processes to
drive thermal energy transfer systems producing power, cool, and heat. Solar energy is
needed to be integrated with other different energy sources (biofuels, fossil fuels,
process waste heat) to guarantee providing a stable energy supply, as industrial process
energy sources must be a stable and reliable system. The thermal energy transform
systems (turbines, refrigerators, heat exchangers) must be selected and designed
carefully to provide the energy demand at the different forms (heat, cool, power). This
dissertation introduces optimization-based approaches to address the following
problems:
• Design of cogeneration systems with solar and fossil systems
• Design and integration of solar-biofuel-fossil cogeneration systems
• Design of solar-assisted absorption refrigeration systems and integration with the
processing facility
• Development of thermally-coupled dual absorption refrigeration systems, and
• Design of solar-assisted trigeneration systems
Several optimization formulations are introduced to provide methodical and systematic
techniques to solve the aforementioned problems. The approach is also sequenced into
interacting steps. First, heat integration is carried out to minimize industrial heating and cooling utilities. Different forms of external-energy sources (e.g., solar, biofuel, fossil
fuel) are screened and selected. To optimize the cost and to overcome the dynamic
fluctuation of the solar energy and biofuel production systems, fossil fuel is used to
supplement the renewable forms of energy. An optimization approach is adopted to
determine the optimal mix of energy forms (fossil, bio fuels, and solar) to be supplied to
the process, the system specifications, and the scheduling of the system operation.
Several case studies are solved to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the
devised procedure.
The results show that solar trigeneration systems have higher overall performance than
the solar thermal power plants. Integrating the absorption refrigerators improves the
energy usage and it provides the process by its cooling demand. Thermal coupling of the
dual absorption refrigerators increases the coefficient of performance up to 33 percent.
Moreover, the process is provided by two cooling levels.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-12-8708 |
| Date | 2010 December 1900 |
| Creators | Tora, Eman |
| Contributors | El-Halwagi, Mahmoud |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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