Thermodynamic Analysis of an Integrated Renewable Energy Driven EWF Nexus: Trade-off Analysis of Combined Systems

Abstract

Abstract The utilization of energy, water and food resources across multiple technologically driven sub-systems has attracted much attention in the literature. In this work, a solar energy-based system integrated with a utility unit is proposed to generate fresh water from seawater by desalination, power, ammonia/urea, and syngas from biomass utilisation. The main objective is to design a combined integrated system (solar/biomass system) based on solar energy, and to study the dependence of the Energy-Water-Food nexus performance on the solar capacity. The core components of the developed system include solar thermal collectors, Rankine cycle, reverse osmosis (RO) desalination unit, food/agriculture sector, biomass gasification process, ammonia and urea production units. The beneficial uses of reverse osmosis brine streams in agriculture sector is considered. The syngas produced from gasification process is used for Ammonia/Urea production as well as in the Rankine cycle to generate electricity. A comphrensive thermodynamic model and energy-exergy balances are used to assess the performance of the proposed system using the Engineering Equation Solver (EES). Different scenarios are solved to capture the trade offs amongst different technologies and explore the optimum EWF interlinkages. Furthermore, the effects of different load changes such as solar radiation and ambient temperature on some of the outputs of the system are investigated. In addition, the energy and exergy efficiencies of the system are calculated and compared.