Energy Systems Optimization: September 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, September 30, 2011

Design and controlling of multiple boiler systems

With increasing energy demands optimal design and operation of multiple boiler system (Fig. 1) has become vital. When it comes to initial designing of multiple boiler systems it is important to figure out the best combination of boilers considering capacity, fuel type etc and dispatch of boilers when catering time varying steam demand. It is a difficult process to come up with optimum system configuration and operation strategy as it involved intricate objective functions. At the same time modeling should have to b coupled with simulation in order to come up with certain objective functions.

Due to these reasons design and control has not taken into consideration in most of the publications though controlling depends upon initial system design. During last few months our research team in University of Moratuwa, studied the capability of using a Fuzzy-Evolutionary hybrid algorithm to come up with this problem. A fuzzy controller was developed using fuzzy Mamdani rules. Basic energy flow and life cycle cash flow was modeled which can be used to optimize both system configuration and operation strategy. Currently group is working on exergy flow through the basic components.