Knowledge Bank

With growing concerns of carbon emission from conventional fuel combustion power plants and increasing energy demand, it is necessary to optimize the power generation technologies. In recent years, the most dominant electric power generation method is the Natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) with downstream CO2 compression system (CCS). However, the efficiency penalty resulted from a CO2 separation process makes the NGCC less desired. Alternatively, due to the high efficiency and low environmental impact of Solid oxide fuel cell, many researchers study on Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) integration system, where fuel can be prepared via coal or biomass gasification process. Especially, the Solid oxide fuel cell/gas turbine cycle integrated with chemical looping hydrogen generation (CLHG-SOFC/GT) technology shows an efficiency of 43.53% without carbon emission, which is very attractive. However, due to the additional coal gasification unit and Air separation unit (ASU), the manufacturing could be capital-intensive. The natural gas chemical looping combustion shows a promising result in gas conversion, making integration of a Natural gas solid oxide fuel cell (NGSOFC) and Chemical looping combustion (CLC) possible. The NGSOFC-CLC process is modeled with Aspen Plus (V10). The performance of the power plant is represented by Net power efficiency (NPE). There are various operating parameters could have an impact on the NPE. Especially, the parametric study of Fuel utilization (FU) factor shows that, within an applicable range of FU factor values (0.75-0.90), with the increase of the FU factor value, the NPE increases and reaches a maximum at FU = 0.90. In addition, the Heat exchanger network (HEN) design base case is generated and studied by Aspen energy analyzer (AEA). Because the base case does not reach the target. An alternative design case is shown in this paper using pinch analysis method. Though the alternative design meets the energy goal, excessive heat exchangers are required. Also, the cross-sectional areas of heat exchangers are greater than that of the base case due to smaller approach temperature. Therefore, it is believed the base case design given by AEA is better.