Energy Saving in Trigeneration Plant for Food Industries

Andrii Radchenko,Roman Radchenko,Serhiy Forduy,Dariusz Mikielewicz,Anatoliy Pavlenko,Mykola Radchenko

doi:10.3390/en15031163

Abstract

The trigeneration plants for combined cooling, heating, and electricity supply, or integrated energy systems (IES), are mostly based on gas reciprocating engines. The fuel efficiency of gas reciprocating engines depends essentially on air intake temperatures. The transformation of the heat removed from the combustion engines into refrigeration is generally conducted by absorption lithium-bromide chillers (ACh). The peculiarity of refrigeration generation in food technologies is the use of chilled water of about 12 °C instead of 7 °C as the most typical for ACh. This leads to a considerable cooling potential not realized by ACh that could be used for cooling the engine intake air. A refrigerant ejector chiller (ECh) is the simplest in design, cheap, and can be applied as the low-temperature stage of a two-stage absorption-ejector chiller (AECh) to provide engine intake air cooling and increase engine fuel efficiency as result. The monitoring data on gas engine fuel consumption and power were analyzed in order to evaluate the effect of gas engine cyclic air cooling.

Highlights

Gas engines (GE) [1,2] are widely applied as drive engines in trigeneration systems, or integrated energy systems (IES), for combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) [3,4]
In order to evaluate the effect of GE inlet air two-stage cooling, compared with conventional conditioning all the ambient air coming into the engine room, the data of gas engine JMS 420 GS-N.L fuel efficiency monitoring were used
A novel concept of two-stage engine inlet air cooling in trigeneration IES for food industries is proposed which issues from the monitoring data on the reduction in specific fuel consumption with lowering the temperatures of air at the inlet of the engine

Summary

Introduction

Gas engines (GE) [1,2] are widely applied as drive engines in trigeneration systems, or integrated energy systems (IES), for combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) [3,4]. The thermodynamic efficiency of GE falls with increasing inlet air temperature: electric power drops and specific fuel consumption grows. The heat released from GE is mostly converted to refrigeration by absorption lithium-bromide chillers (ACh) and used for technological needs. It is quite reasonable to use the refrigeration generated by ACh for engine inlet air cooling (EIAC), i.e., for in-cycle trigeneration [5,6]. In addition to enhancing engine fuel efficiency, this enables prolonging the duration of efficient trigeneration plant operation too [7,8]. It is of great importance that the refrigeration demands for technological duties have a periodic character as a rule

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