Energy and exergy assessments of a new trigeneration system based on organic rankine cycle and biomass combustor

In this paper, energy and exergy analyses of a trigeneration system based on an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and a biomass combustor are presented. This trigeneration system consists of a biomass combustor to provide heat input to the ORC, an ORC for power production, a single-effect absorption chiller for cooling process and a heat exchanger for heating process. The system is designed to produce around 500 kW of electricity. In this study, four cases are considered, namely, electrical-power, cooling-cogeneration, heating-cogeneration and trigener-ation cases. The effects of changing ORC pump inlet temperature and turbine inlet pressure on different key parameters have been examined to evaluate the performance of the trigeneration system. These parameters are energy and exergy efficiencies, electrical to cooling ratio and electrical to heating ratio. Moreover, exergy destruction analysis is presented to show the main sources of exergy destruction and the contribution of each source to the exergy destruction. The study shows that there are significant improvements in energy and exergy efficiencies when tri-generation is used as compared to electrical power. The results show that the maximum efficiencies for the cases considered in this study are as follows: 14.0% for electrical power, 17.0% for cooling cogeneration, 87.0% for heating cogeneration and 89.0% for trigeneration. On other hand, the maximum exergy efficiency of the ORC is 13.0% while the maximum exergy efficiency of the trigeneration system is 28.0%. In addition, this study reveals that the main sources of exergy destruction are the biomass com-bustor and ORC evaporator. KEYWORDS: biomass combustor, efficiency, energy, exergy, organic Rankine cycle (ORC), trigeneration.