Optimal model development of energy hub to supply water, heating and electrical demands of a cement factory

This paper uses the energy hub concept to meet the electricity, heat and water demand of a cement plant. Given the cement plant's high potential for waste heat recovery so the use of recycled waste heat was compared to a state where such waste heat was not used by taking exergy, economic and environmental analyzes into account. The proposed energy hub consists of electricity, heat and desalinated water production equipment. Energy hub is optimized based on the Genetic Algorithm (GA) with the goal of supplying demand, as well as reducing costs and pollutants and increasing the exergy efficiency which ultimately will be selected using the concept of an energy hub at its optimal capacity. By comparing the two energy supplying systems of the current case study and optimal energy hub, results showed that the Total Annual Cost (TAC) level decreased by about 37,000 $/year and exergy efficiency increased by 36%. CO2 emission will also decrease by about 21,620 tons/year. Moreover, in the energy hub concept, the waste heat recovery and ignoring waste heat scenarios were compared. Results indicate that upon optimization, the average of TAC when waste heat is recovered, is 27% of the condition when waste heat is ignored. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.