Thermoeconomic multi-objective optimization of an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) adapted to an existing solid waste power plant

In this paper, thermodynamic and thermoeconomic analyses, and also optimization of an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) were performed. The system was adapted to an existing solid waste power plant with a 5.66 MW installed power capacity in order to produce additional power from the exhaust gas. The actual operating data of the plant were utilized during all stages of the analyses. The originality of this paper is based on the analysis of the possibility of the energy conversion of an exhaust gas with a temperature of 566 °C into the electricity by utilizing an ORC system in the concept of waste-to-energy. Four different working fluids: toluene, octamethyltrisiloxane (MDM), octamethyl cyclotetrasiloxane (D4) and n-decane were considered and analyzed for the current system. This is also another novelty of this study due to lack of such a study, in the open literature, that deals with an ORC utilized for a typical municipal solid waste power plant. According to the thermoeconomic analyses, toluene was found to be the optimum working fluid with the maximum power output of 584.6 kW and the exergy efficiency of 15.69%. The optimization of the cycle was performed by using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm method (NSGA-II) in MATLAB software environment. The optimization results were compared and the deviations of the net power output and the total cost rate were evaluated as −5.89%, −3.51 $/h for toluene; 0.96%, −3.60 $/h for MDM; 8.45%, −2.04 $/h for D4 and 2.00%, −5.54 $/h for n-decane, respectively.