Sustainable maximum power extraction from urban solid waste incineration

Abstract

Urban solid waste production has drastically grown worldwide requiring creative, environmentally correct and sustainable solutions to be developed. This paper considers the basic thermodynamic optimization problem of extracting the most power from a stream of hot exhaust produced by urban solid waste incineration when the contact heat transfer area is fixed. For that, a mathematical model is introduced to evaluate the heat generation rate due to the waste incineration process, and the exergy rate (power) captured by a heat recovery heat exchanger. The numerical results show that when the receiving (cold) stream boils in the counterflow heat exchanger, the thermodynamic optimization consists of locating the optimal capacity rate of the cold stream. At the optimum, the cold side of the heat transfer surface divides itself into three sections: liquid preheating, boiling and vapor superheating. Microalgae cultivation photobioreactors are proposed to treat the produced emissions and increase the global system efficiency for cogeneration of high aggregated value coproducts.