A new approach in treating industrial hazardous wastes for energy generation and thermochemical hydrogen production

A new configuration of using hazardous industrial waste incineration system for energy generation and hydrogen production is proposed in this study. A heat recovery steam generator is used to generate steam for the double-stage Rankine cycle for electrical power generation. The additional heat from the incineration unit exhaust gas are employed to generate steam for the thermochemical Cu-Cl cycle. The CO₂ emissions carried by the incineration reactor exhaust gases are captured using aqueous ammonia-based carbon capturing system. The Aspen Plus V9 software is employed for the designed system simulation. Numerous sensitivity studies are undertaken to investigate each subsystem of the proposed hazardous industrial waste incineration system. The proposed system generates 7.08 MW of electrical output and hydrogen production flowrate of 12.6 kmol/h. The exergetic and energetic efficiencies of the designed system are found to be 43.3% and 39.1%. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis results are presented and discussed. The incineration plants treating the waste and converting waste into energy can be substituted for conventional energy production and this proposed environmentally benign integrated system will resolve environmental problems by employing the hazardous industrial waste to the new configuration of the incineration process for producing hydrogen and power with zero CO₂ emissions.