Flare Gas Waste Heat Recovery: Assessment of Organic Rankine Cycle for Electricity Production and Possible Coupling with Absorption Chiller

Every year, flare gas is responsible for more than 350 million tons of CO2 emissions. Aside from thermal and environmental pollution impacts, flare gas contributes to global warming and enormous economic losses. Thus, waste heat recovery due to flaring gas can be explored through Organic Rankine Cycle ORC systems for electricity production. In this context, the assessment of a toluene ORC system is proposed for a potential application in an Algerian petrochemical unit. The study focuses mainly on highlighting the potential and thermodynamic performances of the ORC application to produce electricity and potential cooling thanks to coupling an absorption chiller by recovering heat due to flaring gas. Such a solution can easily be implemented as an energy efficiency key solution. The ORC electrical production can meet the increasing demand of natural gas initially intended to be provided to a gas power plant and assures the major part of the Algerian electrical production

Case study for experimental validation of a new presizing tool for solar heating, cooling and domestic hot water closed systems

This paper presents a case study experimental validation of PISTACHE which is a new presizing tool intended for designers and planners. It facilitates pre-design and allows the evaluation of annual performance and the integration potential of solar heating, cooling and domestic hot water closed systems. This new tool has been performed in order to standardize the sizing methodology and the comparison of the SHC&DHW closed systems. The comparison framework used in PISTACHE has been performed using seasonal performance indicators that were issued and gathered from experimental data provided by several operating plants. Thus, PISTACHE is an easy graphical user interface and free downloadable tool. In order to check the reliability of the new developed tool, two configuration modes are investigated in this experimental study: a simple cooling mode (RAFSOL plant) and a double cooling and heating mode (SONNENKRAFT installation). The whole validation process is performed using the GenOpt optimization program to determine the optimum set of internal parameters for PISTACHE tool

Sensitivity Analysis of the New Sizing Tool “PISTACHE” for Solar Heating, Cooling and Domestic Hot Water Systems

International audienceThe present paper studies the sensitivity analysis of the new PISTACHE tool's prediction performance and its input parameters. This work is a part of the R&D project MeGaPICS (Method towards Guarantee of Solar Cooling and Heating application – funded by the French National Research Agency). In fact, the PISTACHE tool was developed to provide professionals with a practical tool to design and to estimate the performances of different solar heating and cooling systems. After a short description of the PISTACHE tool, its validation is performed followed by a sensitivity analysis which is conducted using the method of Fourier Amplitude Sensitivity Test (FAST). The obtained results will be displayed and discussed at the end of this paper