Energy and Exergy Investigations Upon Tri-Generation Based Combined Cooling, Heating, and Power (CCHP) System for Community Applications

The continually increasing demand for electricity, cooling and heating accompanied by depleting energy sources, makes it inevitable to use the technologies to harness the available resources to their maximum capacity. The tri-generation systems are the advanced and popular technological option for efficient, reliable, flexible, and less polluting alternatives to utilize the conventional energy resources in an optimal way. In this work, the energy available with conventional fuel is utilized along with solar energy collected through parabolic trough collectors which are integrated with steam injected gas turbine cycle for combined power, heating and cooling requirements. Here a thermodynamic model has been developed for the considered tri-generation combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) system and the detailed energy and exergy analysis is performed. The results obtained, by the thermodynamic modeling and analyses of CCHP system based on the first and second law of thermodynamics have been presented and conclusions are drawn from their analysis. This work provides the energy efficient solution for combined heating, cooling, and power for medium load in community usage which may require plant size in the range of 10–50 MW. However, the cost effectiveness depends on the relative cost of gas turbine fuel with respect to other alternate systems with alternate fuels.