Application of Circular Thermoeconomics to the Diagnosis of Energy Systems

Abstract

This paper reviews the fundamentals of the thermoeconomic diagnosis theory. Thermoeconomic diagnosis is one of the main applications of the exergy cost theory used to identify the causes of additional resource consumption of a system due to inefficiencies in its components, published in the late 1990s. Thermoeconomic diagnosis has usually been applied to diagnose power plants with high consumption of fossil fuels and fixed production. However, it does not consider the final production and waste generation variation. In this paper, Circular Thermoeconomics is applied to analyze in depth the effect of malfunctions on additional waste generation and changes in the final output of the system. This new formulation can be applied to polygeneration systems, where there is a simultaneous variation of final products, and to process integration and industrial symbiosis, where a part of the waste generated by a plant could be reused in other processes or plants.