Design and performance investigation of a biogas fueled combined cooling and power generation system

Nowadays, different renewable sources and energy storages are attracting world attention due to the major concerns about the excessive emissions and the global energy crisis. Hence, this paper studies design and performance investigation of a biogas fueled building cooling and power system, which comprises of an air compressor, an air preheater, a combustion chamber, a gas turbine, some compression chillers and aggregated plugin electric vehicles. In the proposed coproduction facility, biogas is used as an alternative fuel to reduce the total greenhouse gas emissions and increase the economic saving in the consumption of fossil fuels. The feasibility and robust performance of this microgrid is evaluated under extremely-hot summer days. Three compression chillers are installed to satisfy total cooling demand of a large hotel building located in Ahwaz, Iran. Moreover, the total energy requirement of chillers and building electricity demand is supplied through the biogas driven gas turbine cycle. A mid-high temperature waste heat is recovered from the exhaust gases of gas turbine to be used in the air preheating stage. A comprehensive thermodynamic analysis is developed to solve a mixed integer non-linear programming problem with the aim of minimizing total electricity procurement cost of the proposed zero-emission cogeneration micro-plant taking into account the operational constraints of gas turbine cycle, compression chillers, and electric drive vehicles.