Abstract
ENERGY MANAGEMENT OF SOLAR THERMAL ENERGY DRIVING ORC AND TDC
K. A. Abed*, Amr M. A. Amin, Adel A. El-Samahy and Abdullah M. A. Shaaban
ABSTRACT
The present work aims to manage the thermal energy stored from concentrated solar power (CSP) research plant, in order to obtain the best operating condition of CSP system. This plant consists of solar collector field of 120 kW peak thermal capacity, thermal storage tank with 3 tons of therminol-66 oil, an organic rankine cycle (ORC) of 8 kW nominal electric power production capacity, and thermally driven absorption chiller (TDC) of 35 kW cooling capacity. The system was modeled mathematically then calculated using engineering equation solver (EES) software in order to analyze the performance at similar conditions to the real ones to ensure the feasibility of the presented study. When increasing the input thermal power for both ORC and TDC, the kWh cost decreases. The lowest price for ORC kWh is 1.131 $/kWh when 100% of the stored thermal power is used by ORC to generate electricity. Also, the lowest price for TDC kWh is 0.1214 $/kWh when 100% of the stored thermal power is directed to the TDC. To compromise between both ORC and TDC, The best operating condition is obtained when about 45.83% from stored thermal power is used for ORC and 54.17% is used for TDC. In this case, the cost of electrical kWh from ORC is about 1.26 $, while the cost of refrigerant kWh from TDC is about 0.126 $.
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