Assessment of a new coal-fired power plant integrated with solid oxide fuel cell and parabolic trough solar collector

Abstract

Despite the major challenges facing fossil fuels, they are now utilized to supply nearly 80% of the world's energy requirements. Of this amount, about 30% relies on coal-based power plants. Such power plants emit large volumes of pollutant gases into the atmosphere, which has led to serious environmental crises. Therefore, the exploitation of green technologies and/ or the integration of environmentally friendly systems in existing power plants are essential. The aim of the article is to introduce and conceptual-thermodynamic design of a lignite coal-based plant that is integrated with monoxide-hydrogen fueled solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), and parabolic trough solar collector (PTSC) based-solar farms. The present paper provides energy, exergy, and thermodynamic analyzes with considering entropy generation and emission rate of the power plant. In addition, a comparison of system performance when using anthracite instead of lignite is also provided. Also, real climatic data (i.e., Yazd, Iran) have been used to evaluate the behavior of solar fields. The results showed that nearly 93.7 kg/s of gas is raised from the power plant after the combustion process. In addition, proposed power plant has energy and exergy efficiencies of 70.95% and 35.7%, respectively. Moreover, the PTSC2 solar farm in a lignite-fired power plant should have approximately 6.76-fold larger area than that of anthracite.