Evaluation of a solar driven trigeneration system with conventional and new criteria

ABSTRACT

Solar-driven trigeneration systems are able to cover all the building energy needs in heating, cooling and electricity using only the solar energy. The objective of this paper is to evaluate a solar trigeneration system under different criteria in order to make clear that there are numerous factors which have to be taken into consideration in the trigeneration system design. The examined system consists of parabolic trough solar collectors, a storage tank, an organic Rankine cycle and an absorption heat pump. The system is evaluated using different evaluation criteria which are associated with the energy, the exergy and the financial performance of the system. Moreover, a new criterion which takes into account the building energy needs is introduced and is investigated in different scenarios. The final results of this work clearly indicate that the optimisation of the solar driven trigeneration systems is depended on the desired design conditions and goals.

Abbreviations: COP, Coefficient of performance; ECO, Economizer; EES, Engineering Equation Solver; EVAP, Evaporator; ORC, Organic Rankine Cycle; PTC, Parabolic trough collector; SC, Scenario

KEYWORDS:

• Solar energy
• parabolic trough collector
• trigeneration
• optimisation
• multi-criteria

Acknowledgments

Dr. Evangelos Bellos would like to thank ‘Bodossaki Foundation’ for its financial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Evangelos Bellos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5876-6549

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bodossaki Foundation.