Performance Enhancement of an Integrated Solar Combined Cycle with Multi-Stage Flash Desalination Cycle as Bottoming Cycle

Abstract

Integrated solar combined cycle (ISCC) is frequently used in countries with high incident solar radiation in order to enhance the cycle efficiency by increasing the net output power and decreasing fuel consumption. The present study proposes a modified ISCC is gas cycle with a steam Rankine cycle and integrated with a multi-stage flash desalination cycle (MSF). The multi-stage compression with intercooling is taken into consideration for the gas turbine unit while the MSF is used in order to cool the compressed air and produce distillate water from the received thermal energy. 50 MW solar field are integrated to steam power cycle. The amount of solar energy and ambient temperature data are obtained from weather data from TRNSYS software as actual data of the two Egyptian cities, Elarish and Bernis. The results of the proposed cycle show improvement by 20.76 % more than the original cycle. Furthermore, the proposed cycle produces 130.6 MW average monthly net power and 4950 M3/day average monthly freshwater in summer while it produces 133.9 MW average monthly net power and 3470 M3/day average monthly freshwater in winter.