Abstract
Abstract Environmental threats of coal usage in the electricity production combined with the consumption of renewable and non-renewable resources had led to worldwide energy challenges. The cost of coal mining and economical and environmentally sustainable usage of mined coal could be optimized by efficient management of coal supply chain. This paper provides a mathematical model for improving coal supply chain sustainability including the cost of exergy destruction (entropy). In the proposed method, exergy analysis is used to formulate the model considering not only economic costs but also destructed exergy cost, while genetic algorithm is applied to efficiently solve the proposed model. In order to validate the proposed methodology, some numerical examples of coal supply chains are presented and discussed to show the usability of the proposed exergetic coal supply chain model and claim its benefits over the existing models. According to the results, the proposed method provides 17.6% saving in the consumed exergy by accepting 2.7% more economic costs. The presented model can be used to improve the sustainability of coal supply chain for either designing new projects or upgrading existing processes.
Highlights
Ecosystems provide the basis for development of human community and sustainable industries
To understand the effectiveness of the exergy analysis, the model is solved under two times: one by considering both economic and destructed exergy costs of Eq (15), and another by considering only the economic costs of Eq (13) as objective function of genetic algorithm (GA)
To design a new coal supply chain process or optimize an existing one, some decisions should be made such as choosing the number, capacity, and the technology used for different network facilities
Summary
Ecosystems provide the basis for development of human community and sustainable industries. Energy supply is a fundamental component of industrial processes which widely impacts ecosystems, degrades them, and generates environmental pollutions. The consumed energy should be supplied from sustainable resources [1]. The efficiency and quality of the energy supply can be modelled using exergy analysis [2]. Exergy is a thermodynamic concept used to measure the performance of processes aims at increasing the efficiency of energy utilization and quantifying the magnitude of losses [3]. Coal is the most important component for electricity production. 53% of the electricity produced in USA is provided by coal, while 92% of extracted coal is used for electricity production [6]
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