Energy and exergy analysis of a pilot plant for the co-production of cold and electricity

Given the ever-increasing global demand for energy and the attention to be paid to environmental issues and climate change, research is developing more and more about new cold production technologies using renewable sources or recovery. This cooling demand is mainly covered by technologies conventional machines, in particular vapor compression machines, which leads to a high increased demand for electricity. In this context, absorption systems (Herold et al. 2016), lend themselves well to the recovery of heat at low temperature for the production of cold. The advantage of these machines is that the mechanical compression is replaced by a compression thermochemical that uses heat. Although characterized by a low level of maturity technology (TRL 3-4), an even more ambitious study concerns combined systems based on exploitation of thermal energy at low temperatures, in which electrical power and cooling are produced in the same cycle. The present work focuses on the analysis of a pilot installation (Figure 1) of combined production cooling and electricity (CFE) in parallel, from a low temperature source [80 -150°C] and from maximum thermal power of the generator 15 kW.