Abstract
In current work, a new poly-generation system using a solar tower with thermal storage is proposed. The molten salts which is the heat transfer fluid (HTF) provides input energy to the supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) cycle in the main heat exchanger (MHX) to run the sCO2 recompression Brayton cycle. Some of the waste heat in the precooler from the sCO2 recompression cycle is recovered in the generator to operate a lithium bromide-water (LiBr-H2O) absorption cooling cycle (ACC) in order to enhance the overall performance of the poly-generation system. Furthermore, the exit temperature of the molten salts from the MHX is still high and it has been used to generate motive steam for a multi-effect desalination plant with thermal vapor compression (MED-TVC) to produce distilled water. A details energy, exergy and simple economic analyses of the poly-generation system with power, freshwater and cooling production are performed using Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software. From the results, the poly-generation system produces a 100 MW of power, 780 kg/s of freshwater and 23.5 MW of cooling. From the simple economic analysis, the electricity and freshwater costs are 6.7 cent/kWh and 0.89 $/m3, respectively.
