Thermo-Economic Optimization on the Waste Heat Recovery System of SCO2 Coal-Fired Power Plants

The temperature of SCO2 fed to the boiler in SCO2 coal-fired power plants is relatively high, ∼500 °C. It leads to high boiler exhaust temperature, which is ∼120 °C according to previous studies. Waste heat recovery from low temperature fluegas in SCO2 coal-fired power plants is a key issue to be addressed to enhance power plant efficiency and electrostatic precipitator performance. Therefore, systems of waste heat recovery from low-temperature fluegas were proposed in this study. To evaluate the economic performances of the proposed systems and obtain the best system configurations, economic and thermodynamic models were developed. Moreover, multi-parameter optimization model based on Genetic Algorithm was developed. The waste heat recovery system is proposed and optimized by considering coupling and matching of the air preheating process, heat regenerative process and fluegas cooling process. With a 1000MW SCO2 coal-fired power plant as the reference case, thermodynamic and economic analyses were carried out. Results show that when the low temperature economizer is integrated together with the main compressor intercooling and flue bypass ahead the air-preheater, the temperature of exhaust fluegas can be decreased to ∼95 °C and the power plant efficiency can be enhanced by 1.39%-pts compared with basic system. Through the economic model analysis, the system levelized cost of electricity is 0.04158 $ kW−1 h−1.