THERMOECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION OF AN INTEGRATED SOLAR SYSTEM FOR HYDROGEN PRODUCTION USING PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

This study aims to investigate the hydrogen production process using an integrated system based on solar energy. This system includes an evacuated tube collector to absorb solar energy as input energy of the system. A parametric analysis was conducted to determine the most important design parameters and evaluate these parameters' impact on the system's objective functions. For identifying the optimum system conditions, multi-objective optimization was performed using particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results obtained from the parametric analysis show that an increment in the collector mass flow rate and the turbine inlet temperature, as well as a decrement in the collector area and the evaporator inlet temperature, results in improving the system exergy efficiency. Furthermore, the optimization results demonstrate that the exergy efficiency of the system can be improved from 1% to 3.5%; however, this enhancement in exergy efficiency of the system leads to increase the system costs from 20$/h to 26$/h, both at optimum states. At the optimum point, the average values for other performance parameters affecting the objective function including total output power production, cooling capacity, and hydrogen production rate are obtained as 24.24 kW, 47.07 kW, and 218.56 g/s, respectively.