Chapter 7 - Exergoeconomic, exergoenvironmental, and conclusion

Abstract

The high performance of the proposed integrated systems should be feasible technically, economically, and environmentally. Exergoeconomic analysis can be used in thermal systems as a modern tool for integrating exergy and economic analysis to investigate biomass-based energy conversion processes. As a complement, the exergoenvironmental analysis can be adopted to assign environmental impacts within each process component for both energy and material flows as well as thermodynamic inefficiencies. Though some researchers employ exergoeconomic analysis and exergoenvironmental analysis in design energy systems, they mostly focus on only one of the two aspects (either exergoeconomic analysis or exergoenvironmental analysis). However, the systems operating under optimized exergoeconomic conditions might not agree with the best exergoenvironmental requirements. Furthermore, this book's main conclusions are: (1) Exergy analysis is a useful tool to evaluate a system's performance. (2) There are two engineering design problems in integrated processes. The first is the problem of unit operation design and the second is designing entire systems. This book mostly addresses the second issue. (3) Ingenuity and creativity are required to design a process and implement efficiency improvement. (4) However, comprehensive evaluations are needed considering the interrelations among exergy efficiency itself, economy, and environment for a sustainable system.