Analysis of publications on expander and trigeneration technologies

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The Education and Science Ministry of the RF provides financial support to a number of universities under the Federal Special Program «Research and development on top priority directions of elaborating the scientific-technological complex of Russia for 2014–2020». According to the above Program, the Ministry expects «identifying directions and developing technological solutions providing growth of thermodynamic and technical-economic efficiency for distributed and low power engineering facilities». In particular, under agreements made between the Ministry and the university engaged in R&D, articles are to published in the «Heat Power Engineering» journal, which will be considered as a kind of reports on R&D fulfilled. However, analysis of the already published articles-reports suggests a poor theoretical background of the authors in the fields of thermodynamics, turbomachines theory, and heat power engineering. Besides, the above analysis provides evidence that the studies presented are characterized by the absence of promising developments and tend to present previously known technical solutions whose thermodynamic efficiency has not been proved. Besides, the analysis performed suggests that some of the technological solutions suggested by the authors cannot be implemented. The analysed publications provide no results of determination of thermodynamic efficiency of the suggested expander and trigeneration systems. To prove efficiency of the systems a common comparative calculation of technicaleconomical parameters of combined heat and power plants with and without DGU is presented, which is misrepresented as thermodynamic analysis. A «modified» coefficient of fuel heat utilization is used in the capacity of a determinant of thermodynamic efficiency for this type of systems, although the above-mentioned coefficient is not suitable for this purpose and only leads to overstatement of their efficiency factor. Using DGUs at combined heat and power plants which have rather high consumption of NG and other heat power sources is of no interest for the above plants because of a low electrical power of DGUs: its value is at best 0.6–0.7% of the rated capacity of combined plants. As for implementation of DGUs at low capacity facilities, it seems to be unfeasible because of impossibility to develop the required equipment. Advantages of DGUs stated by some authors are refuted by the fact that all four DGUs used to be operated in the Mosenergo system were decommissioned more than six years ago.