Abstract
This paper studies the application of renewable energy sources in wastewater treatment plants to achieve self-sustain- ability of power. The data of wastewater treatment plant in the rural city of Toukh-EGYPT are presented as a case-study. The primary objective is to provide an entirely renewable standalone power system, which satisfies lowest possible emissions with the minimum lifecycle cost. Mass balance principle is applied on the biodegradable components in the wastewater to evaluate the volume of digester gas that is produced from sludge through anaerobic digestion process. Using digester gas as a fuel lead to study combined-heat-and-power technologies, where fuel cell is selected in order to abide by the low emissions constraint. The study assessed the electrical power obtained from fuel cell and the utilization of the exhausted heat energy for additional electrical power production using a micro-turbine. After covering the major part of load demand, the use of other renewable energy sources was studied. The strength of both solar and wind energy was determined by the case-study location. Hybrid optimization model for electric renewable (HOMER) software was used to simulate the hybrid system composed of combined-heat-and-power units, wind turbines and photovoltaic systems. Simulation results gave the best system configuration and optimum size of each component beside the detailed electrical and cost analysis of the model.
Highlights
Energy demands are increasing exponentially resulting into a rapid grow in need of conventional fossil fuels [1]
This paper studies the application of renewable energy sources in wastewater treatment plants to achieve self-sustainability of power
The fuel cell model selected for the case study is the one introduced in [30] for utilization of energy recovered from a wastewater treatment plant & using digester gas as a fuel
Summary
Energy demands are increasing exponentially resulting into a rapid grow in need of conventional fossil fuels [1]. The idea of studying the self-sustainability of power in industrial & service facilities looks very appealing due to their relatively high energy demand, such as wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) This is because water pollution by nature is an energy intensive process. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that WWTPs with influent flow rate less than 19,000 m3/day didn’t produce enough biogas, through anaerobic digestion process, to make its use as a renewable source for electrical & thermal energies economically feasible [11]. This problem limits the use of biogas—for the plant in-field sustainable power generation—from the point of WWTP scale. The production of digester gas has been estimated given the sludge daily mass, volume and concentration of biodegradable components in the raw sewage and sludge
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