Abstract
This study aims to investigate the hydrogen production process using an integrated system based on solar energy. This system includes an evacuated tube collector to absorb solar energy as input energy of the system. A parametric analysis was conducted to determine the most important design parameters and evaluate these parameters' impact on the system's objective functions. For identifying the optimum system conditions, multi-objective optimization was performed using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results obtained from the parametric analysis show that an increment in the collector mass flow rate and the turbine inlet temperature, as well as a decrement in the collector area and the evaporator inlet temperature, results in improving the system exergy efficiency. Furthermore, the optimization results demonstrate that the exergy efficiency of the system can be improved from 1% to 3.5%; however, this enhancement in exergy efficiency of the system leads to increase the system costs from 20$/h to 26$/h, both at optimum states. At the optimum point, the average values for other performance parameters affecting the objective function including total output power production, cooling capacity, and hydrogen production rate are obtained as 24.24 kW, 47.07 kW, and 218.56 g/s, respectively.
Highlights
Depletion of the fossil fuel resources has compelled human society to explore alternative fuels
The reason of the low exergy efficiency is that the energy obtained from the sun at higher temperatures is converted into the other forms of energy at lower temperatures, so a great exergy loss occurs during the total process
An integrated solar energy system for hydrogen production was investigated in this research
Summary
Depletion of the fossil fuel resources has compelled human society to explore alternative fuels. Regarding population growth, enhanced human life standards, and increased level of CO2 emissions, clean and eco-friendly fuels have attracted a lot of attention. In this regard, many researches have attempted to produce hydrogen using renewable energy resources. Syed et al [2] investigated several flat plate solar collectors to provide energy for a single-effect absorption chiller (35 kW), in Madrid, Spain. They reported a maximum spontaneous chilling efficiency of 0.6, an average daily efficiency of 0.42, and a cycle efficiency of 0.34. Mateus and Oliveira [5] simulated a solar heating and absorptive chilling system using two flat plates and analyzed solar tube collectors for a house, a hotel, and an office, in three
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