Energy Systems Optimization: January 2011

Background

Energy systems are playing a major role in day today life. It may be your refrigerator, air conditioner, power generator that you use to get electricity etc. that we discuss. It is prudent that though we use power and energy very few of us are concerned on energy conservation. Even though we always try to match it with financial aspects of it I feel that there is something more on it especially when consider about the social responsibility. Fossil fuel resources are depleting at a rapid speed and at the same time, we are facing lot of problems created by emission of fossil fuel combustion. Therefore, we are in period that special attention should be given to conservation of energy.

Optimal designs of Energy systems become vital in such circumstances, which is always a challenging process where number of technoeconomical and environmental aspects need to be considered. Most of the times modeling related with such energy systems is a difficult task. Meanwhile number of design parameters is to be considered. This makes the optimization work hard and it is essential to move away from classical methods.

In this blog, I am sharing the research work we carried out by our group on optimization of such energy systems. Mainly we are focusing on optimization of multiple boiler systems, hybrid energy systems, and waste to energy pathways. I am really please to hear your comments and it would be a great support to improve the quality of our work.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Modeling of energy components

Modeling of HESs mainly comprised of energy flow modeling and life-cycle cost modeling. Power supply reliability and pollutant emitted has been also considered as objectives to be modeled specially with the introduction of multi objective optimization.

Energy flow modeling
Among those components energy flow modeling becomes vital as its directly linked with system sizing ultimately combined with system life-cycle cost which is the main factor considered when designing HESs. General Energy Flow of a HES comprised of three components

Renewable energy component (wind, solar, pico/micro hydro etc)
Dispatchable energy component (ICG modeling)
Energy storage mechanism (battery bank/fuel cell modeling)

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Optimization of Stand alone Hybrid Energy Systems (HES)

When it comes study of HESs its a combination of modeling, simulation, and optimization. We have directly jump up to optimization due to its importance. Optimization of HESs becomes challenging due to complexity of decision space variables and objective functions. In most of the cases decision space is comprised of four variables these are

Number of wind turbines
Number of Solar PV Panels
Number of Battery Banks
ICG Capacity

In most of the cases this would increase with the introduction of wind turbine type and SPV panel type which becomes important factor when it comes to applications. All these variables are related to system configuration but we all that system operation strategy also should have to be optimized.