The performances of solar cells and thermoelectricmaterials are governed by thermodynamics. The material properties of these have temperature dependence due to thermal expansions of lattices and an effect of electron–phonon coupling etc. The temperature-dependent energy levels has been included in statisticalmechanics, naturally requiring a rectification of the second law of thermodynamics with...

This paper presents an method for heat rate monitoring of power plants which employs a true “systems approach”. As an ultimate monitoring parameter, derived from Second Law concepts, it quantifies system losses in terms of fuel consumption by individual components and processes. If electricity is to be produced with the least un-productive fuel consumption, then thermodynamic losses must be und...

A lake ecosystem is continuously exposed to environmental stressors with non-linear interrelationships between abiotic factors and aquatic organisms. Ecosystem health depicts the capacity of system to respond to external perturbations and still maintain structure and function. In this study, we explored the effects of abiotic factors on ecosystem health of Taihu Lake in 2013, China from a syste...

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the exergy costs of a real large industrial boiler with the aim of improving efficiency. Specifically, the 350-MW front-fired, natural circulation, single reheat and balanced draft coal-fired boiler forms part of a 1050-MW conventional power plant located in Spain. We start with a diagram of the power plant, followed by a formulation of the exergy cost alloca...

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Exergy is considered as a goal function or ecological orientor. Normally at the edge o...

Energy and exergy analyses were carried out for a pilot parabolic solar dish-Stirling System. The system was set up at a site at Kerman City, located in a sunny desert area of Iran. Variations in energy and exergy efficiency were considered during the daytime hours of the average day of each month in a year. A maximum collector energy efficiency and total energy efficiency of 54% and 12.2%, res...

The necessity of air-conditioning causes the enormous energy use of underground train stations. Exergy and thermoeconomic analysis is applied to the annual operation of the air-conditioning system of a large underground train station in Taiwan. The current installation and the monitored data are taken to be the base case, which is then compared to three different optimized designs. The total re...

Different quality, reserves and production force countries to import fossil fuels to advance their economic development. It is exergy of fossil fuels that is essentially important to economy. Thus, it forms an international exergy flow network embodied in the global fossil energy trade. Based on complex network theory, we built a global fossil energy exergy flow network with countries as nodes,...

Comparative energy and exergy investigations are reported for a transcritical N2O refrigeration cycle with a throttling valve or with an expander when the gas cooler exit temperature varies from 30 to 55 ◦C and the evaporating temperature varies from −40 to 10 ◦C. The system performance is also compared with that of similar cycles using CO2. Results show that the N2O expander cycle exhibits a l...