Development of a new trigenerational integrated system for dimethyl-ether, electricity and fresh water production

A novel trigeneration integrated system is proposed and analyzed in this paper. The present system utilizes gas turbine exhaust gas for heat recovery and capturing carbon dioxide after expanding in the turbine and generating electricity. Moreover, a Cu-Cl thermochemical cycle is incorporated in the system to produce hydrogen, and a multi-effect desalination is integrated to provide fresh water to the Cu-Cl cycle and for domestic use as well. The present integrated system is modeled and simulated using the Aspen Plus software package for chemical processes and Engineering Equation Solver for the remaining subsystems. Both energy and exergy analyses are performed to study and assess the proposed system through energy and exergy efficiencies. Therefore, the overall energy and exergy efficiencies of the proposed trigeneration system are found to be 39.72% and 55.2% respectively.