Energy, Vol.171, 1066-1076, 2019
Performance enhancement of an integrated system with solar flat plate collector for hydrogen production using waste heat recovery
The current research presents the thermodynamic modeling and assessment of the solar-based integrated energy systems (IES) for hydrogen production with and without thermoelectric generators (TEGs) waste heat recovery system (WHRS). The results show that the net output power of the conventional system is 66.9 kW and 14 kW more power can be generated by using the TEGs WHRS in the IES. The net output power of the proposed system reaches 78.7 kW, indicating an enhancement by 17.6%. Also, increasing output power leads to an increase in the efficiency of IES from 6.9% to 8.1%. It means that, with the use of WHRS the efficiency is increased by 1.2%. However, more increase in efficiency is observed in the proposed system, and the variations of efficiency relative to the mass flow rate of the collector are extremely slight in the conventional system. Moreover, modeling results demonstrate that the hydrogen production rate in the proposed system is approximately 16% more than that in the conventional system. Furthermore, if the figure of merit is increased from 0.001 1/K to 0.009 1/K, a significant enhancement from 0.4% to 1.9% (for TEGs WHRS efficiency) could be achieved. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.