Energy, exergy and economic analyses of a novel system to recover waste heat and water in steam power plants

Power plants are one of the most energy consuming industries in the world. Therefore improving their performance could save a huge amount of energy and water. In this paper, a novel system is proposed to recover the wasted heat and water in a steam power plant and then exergy and economic analyses are applied to the system to study its feasibility. The results show that by using this recovery system, total output power of the system increases by 1.2%. The new system has the capability of producing 82.5 kg/s fresh water from blowdown streams. It also converts the brine stream of desalination system into hydrogen and hypochlorite. The economic analysis shows that the payback time of the system is 0.68 year which indicates that the system is very beneficial.