Energetic, exergetic, exergoeconomic, environmental and sustainability analyses of a solar, geothermal and biomass based novel multi-generation system for production of power, hydrogen, heating, cooling and fresh water

Abstract

The present study proposes and investigates a novel solar, geothermal and biomass based multi-generation system producing multiple outputs to generate power, hydrogen, heating, cooling, and fresh water. Parabolic trough solar collectors, a two stages Rankine cycle, two organic Rankine cycles, two absorption cooling systems, a gas turbine system, a once-through (OT) multi stage flash (MSF) desalination unit, a geothermal unit, a heat pump, an electrolyser and a thermal energy storage are used as sub-systems. The novelty of the system is to focus on novel sub-system design pattern for the proposed multi-generation system by using multiple energy inputs as there is a gap about those studies in the literature. The overall system performance is evaluated from energetic, exergetic, exergo-economic, environmental (4E) and sustainability points of view by using the EES software package. The total installed power and hydrogen mass flow rates are 7.76 MW and 3.52 kg/h, respectively. The energy and exergy efficiency values of the overall system are found to be 65.55% and 27.09%. Fresh water flow rate is calculated to be 6.16 kg/s with 10 stages. The overall unit product cost is determined to be 21,79 $/GJ and the overall social ecologic factor is calculated to be 1.37.