Assessments of the feasibility of decoupling energy consumption from economic growth could benefit from an improved understanding of the size, nature and value of different energy flows. This understanding may be enhanced by focusing upon so-called “useful exergy”—a measure of both the quantity and “quality” of energy (defined here as its thermodynamic ability to perform physical work) at the “...

Exergy concepts and exergy based methods offer an insight to the understanding of sustainable energy engineering. The utilization of energy and other resources by applying physical concept as exergy and exergy based methods and the value of these tools in the design are presented, in particular Life Cycle Exergy Analysis (LCEA). LCEA is applied to a typical wind power plant. This brings a new a...

In this research study, energy, exergy and economic analyses is performed for a combined cycle power plant (CCPP) with a supplementary firing system. The purpose of this analyses is to evaluate the economic feasibility of a CCPP by applying an optimization techniques based on Evolutionary algorithms. Actually, the evolutionary algorithms of Firefly, PSO and NSGA-II are applied to minimize the c...

Exergy analysis is important and has been widely used to evaluate the thermodynamic efficiency of a variety of processes. Therefore, there is a need to develop a tool for monitoring exergy of a process in real-time and for studying the effects of various feed, equipment, process and environmental changes. The ultimate aim of this work is to develop a tool to enable dynamic and online exergy ana...

Exergy is demonstrated to be a useful measurable parameter reflecting the state of the ecosystem, and allowing estimation of the severity of its anthropogenous damage. Exergy is shown to have advantages such as good theoretical basis in thermodynamics, close relation to information theory, rather high correlation with others ecosystem goal functions and relative ease of computation. Nowadays ex...

In this paper, a comparison of exergetic models between two hot air engines (a Gamma type Stirling prototype having a maximum output mechanical power of 500 W and an Ericsson hot air engine with a maximum power of 300 W) is made. Referring to previous energetic analyses, exergetic models are set up in order to quantify the exergy destruction and efficiencies in each type of engine. The repartit...

The second law of thermodynamics and, specifically, exergy analysis have been traditionally used for the assessment and optimization of energy systems. Nevertheless, as shown in this paper, exergy could also constitute a powerful tool for the evaluation of mineral commodities. That said, new or re-defined exergy-based concepts need to be developed. This paper presents Thanatia as a baseline for...

A single vacuum tube based solar cooker has high energy and exergy efficiency, and is capable of achieving cooking temperatures as high as 250 C. The reason for high energy and exergy efficiencies of this solar cooker is the high achievable concentration ratios of 15e20, which are not possible with multiple vacuum tube based solar cookers. In this paper, a comparative study has been carried out...