ENERGY AND EXERGY ANALYSIS FOR BIOMASS CO-FIRING COAL FUEL BASED THERMAL POWER PLANT

Satyananda Tripathy, Jayanarayan Mahakud, Manmatha K. Roul

Abstract: Environmental pollution and its control has been one of the most challenging problems to the mankind, especially to the scientific and engineering community. Out of the various environmental polluting sources, excess CO2 in atmosphere is the single largest contributor for global warming effect. This CO2 imbalance in the atmosphere is caused by excessive release of CO2 to the environment from various the man-made industries, like power plants, chemical plants, automobiles, etc. Since coal fuel based power plants are concentrated large source of production of excess CO2, attention is focused on sequestration of CO2 to maintain the environmental CO2 balance. However, due to its cost intensiveness and technological difficulties, implementation of CO2 sequestration option has not been adopted by all. A detailed exergy analysis of the control volume has been carried out considering physical and chemical exergy of all the streams and presented in this dissertation. It has been concluded from the results of this analysis that biomass cofiring option may only be considered as a short-term measure to reduce the CO2 production since the exergy losses including the irreversibility losses are more compared to only coal based power plants.

Keywords: Energy and exergy analysis, Biomass co-firing, Thermal power plant, Environmental pollution etc.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0304010