Exergy-water nexus of a multi-energy complementary trigeneration system with different fuel mixture ratios

Chao Fu, Anxiang Li, Qingfei Shen, Shuo Ding, Zheng Duan and Jiangjiang Wang

Energy, 2024, vol. 304, issue C

Abstract: Complex coupling relationships of energy, exergy and water streams in multi-energy complementary systems due to different characteristics of energy flows are necessarily revealed to determine the intensities of downstream products. This paper proposes a multi-energy complementary trigeneration system driven by biomass, solar energy, and natural gas to generate cooling, heating, and power products. An exergy-water analysis approach, considering energy levels of streams, is adopted to determine the exergy and water footprint intensities per unit energy products. A life cycle assessment method is used to calculate the water footprint of biomass and natural gas as the primary energy sources. The relationship between the exergy and water footprint intensity of the system equipment and output products is presented and discussed with the mixture ratios of natural gas and biomass product gas. Furthermore, the cumulative exergy and water footprint intensity of products are analyzed under different system working conditions, such as mixture ratio of biomass and natural gas and the solar irradiance. When the same mixture volume gas fuels drive the trigeneration system, the overall exergy efficiency is 25.38 % while the efficiency including the upstream cumulative exergy destruction is only 21.93 %. The unit water footprint intensities of power and cooling products based on exergy measurement are 7.12 kg/kWh and 36.32 kg/kWh, respectively. The exergy-water footprint sensitivity of biomass and natural gas on system product intensities are implemented to consider the uncertain variables. When the mixture ratio increases from 0 to 1, the cumulative exergy destruction of system power is declined by 35.62 % under the uncertain ranges of ±50 %. Also, its water footprint is declined by 91.62 %. The proposed model provides an effective tool to reveal the exergy-water nexus and determine the intensities of multi-energy products.

Keywords: Multi-energy complementary system; Trigeneration system; Exergy analysis; Exergy-water nexus; Water footprint intensity; Cumulative exergy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544224017250
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:304:y:2024:i:c:s0360544224017250

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2024.131952

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().