Por:
Alvaro Hernán Restrepo Victoria
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Fecha:
2012
A technological and environmental alternative has been studied for about a decade to reduce the consumption of coal. It consists of substitute one part of the coal by biomass (neutral generated of CO2) in a co-_ring process. The co-_ring process consists of the controlled combustion of two or more fuels in the same burner. According to research performed in the US and Europe this process has economic and technical viability. And depending on the characteristics of the fuel, this process can contribute reducing the greenhouse gases (GHG).
This thesis presents a methodological proposal to analyze and evaluate a thermoelectric power plant from the exergoenviromental point of view, operating in co-_ring process and using coal and biomass. The boundary of the problem is composed by the power plant and the technological paths to obtain and manipulate the fuels. Exergy is used in the thermodynamic analysis and the life cycle assessment method is proposed to quantify the environmental impact. The climate change category was used following the global warming potential index.
Two scenarios were evaluated: scenario A corresponds to the power plant operating with 100% coal and scenario B corresponds to the power plant operating in co-_ring with 90% of coal and 10% of biomass. The technological route used for the coal is established between the southern mineral region of the state of Santa Catarina and the Jorge Lacerda thermoelectric power plant complex, which is located at Capivari de Baixo. The information utilized for the biomass path was obtained from the research performed in the thermoelectric power plant complex. The purpose of this task was to use the biomass from the rice farms as fuel.
The analysis showed that the power plant is largely responsible for exergy destruction. Moreover it has the largest generated impact associated with the analyzed category. From these results, an exergoenvironmental analysis for the representative thermodynamic cycle was performed. The results showed that the boiler constitutes the equipment with the largest potential of improvement.
Finally, an exergoenvironmental global index was proposed to compare the exergoenvironmental impact of the thermoelectric generation process for both scenarios, which were compared with Carnot cycle scenario. The exergoenvironmental global index showed that 11% improvement is possible for the scenario B when compared with scenario A without taking in account the biomass microbial decomposition and up to the 35% when the decomposition was considered.
Fuente:
Biblioteca Virtual Banco de la República
Formatos de contenido:
Tesis
