A thermodynamic irreversibility based design method for multi-contaminant hydrogen networks

This paper presents a new method for the design of hydrogen networks with multiple contaminants. The proposed method is based on the principle that minimizing thermodynamic irreversibility of the satisfying process will result in minimum utility consumption of the hydrogen network. Therefore, the entropy change which indicates the thermodynamic irreversibility of the satisfying process is minimized for each sink to obtain the minimum utility consumption. A new concept, virtual concentration, which is drawn from the thermodynamic analysis of the satisfying process, is proposed to measure the purity of the hydrogen streams with multiple contaminants. Source streams with the nearest virtual concentration as the sink are used to satisfy the sink to reduce the entropy change of each satisfying process. The detailed design procedures are proposed to obtain the hydrogen network distribution. The exact flow rate of each source stream is achieved by solving the mass balance equations. Three literature examples are illustrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.