Biomass fueled chemical looping hydrogen generation, high temperature solar thermal and thermochemical energy storage hybrid system

Abstract

Over the past decades, environmental and atmospheric pollution have become a significant global issue. Considering the non-renewable resources in the energy supply sectors that are responsible for a major part of these pollutions, makes the situation only worse. Therefore, switching to power generation systems operating on renewable resources with little to none environmental contamination seems more urgent and attractive than ever. In this study, an integrated multi-generation system utilizing two types of clean and renewable fuels is presented. A novel system design comprising a concentrated solar thermal subsystem integrated with a thermochemical energy storage subsystem and a zero-emission subsystem using chemical looping technology for cogeneration of electricity, hydrogen, and heat is investigated. The produced syngas is divided into two parts to fuel the solid oxide fuel cell subsystem for power generation and the chemical looping subsystem for hydrogen production. An extensive performance analysis is conducted to evaluate the effects of various parameters on the system's performance in order to determine the optimal values which are reported. The solar subsystem simulated using Engineering Equation Solver software resulted in 77.69 % and 79 % for the receiver thermal efficiency and field optical efficiency, respectively. Also, the storage subsystem simulated using Aspen Plus software resulted in a maximum round-trip efficiency of 79.34 %. More, the produced power in the SOFC subsystem and the Lower heating value of the generated hydrogen are found to be 5099 kW and 6124.45 kW, respectively. The values of the SOFC, electrical, hydrogen production, total, net total, and CO2 separation efficiency rates are realized as 71.2 %, 51.21 %, 92.19 %, 60.57 %, 54.72 %, and 100 % respectively.