Sustainable technologies for reliability: an exergetic analysis in a cogeneration power plant

Abstract

Since the oil crisis in the seventies the importance of the energy in the industry and in the tertiary services has been growing. Factors like globalization of the markets, the internal birth of similar industries, the need to cut costs to be competitive, the national energy planning for industry sectors and the environment protection, produces a continuum effort by the industry to centre investigation resources in the optimization of the energy production and utilization. One of technology used to achieve these goals is the combined heat and power CHP. This work describes the energy and exergy analysis performed in a 4 MW cogeneration plant of a cane sugar refinery. Improvements in the overall plant efficiency were achieved.