Chemical looping combustion integrated Organic Rankine Cycled biomass-fired power plant – Energy and exergy analyses

Global warming due to greenhouse emission is the most annoying problem for sustaining life on earth. Many researchers are contributing towards the development of sustainable energy technologies. Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) is a modernistic technology in which fuels produce heat and power without carbon emission. Agricultural biomass can be a potential substitute to fossil fuels for low capacity energy generation. Further, CLC of biomass is a carbon negative technology which can address the present greenhouse gas emission problem. In this study, a novel configuration of CLC based biomass power plant integrated with Organic Rankine Cycle is proposed. The effects of key design parameters like oxygen carrier-to-biomass ratio, operating pressure of air/fuel reactors and air reactor operating temperature are studied to improve the process energy and exergy efficiencies. Integration of waste heat recovery recuperators with ORC cycle resulted in further increase of power output by 49.93 kW. The performance of the proposed configuration is compared with conventional power plant to highlight its advantages. The net power output of the final CLC integrated configuration and conventional power plants are 492.19 kW and 273.12 kW respectively. Finally, the individual unit wise exergy analysis is presented to identify the possible performance improvement options. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd