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

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 CO 2 in atmosphere is the single largest contributor for global warming effect. This CO 2 imbalance in the atmosphere is caused by excessive release of CO 2 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 CO 2 , attention is focused on sequestration of CO 2 to maintain the environmental CO 2 balance. However, due to its cost intensiveness and technological difficulties, implementation of CO 2 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 co-firing option may only be considered as a short-term measure to reduce the CO 2 production since the exergy losses including the irreversibility losses are more compared to only coal based power plants.