Techno-economic analysis of a sCO2 power plant for waste heat recovery in steel industry

• Main Authors: Matteo Biondi, Ambra Giovannelli, Giuseppina Di Lorenzo, Coriolano Salvini
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2020-12-01
• Series: Energy Reports
• Subjects: Supercritical carbon dioxide; Waste heat recovery; Techno-economic analysis; Power production; Heat-to-power
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484720315729

Industrial facilities release a large amount of heat as a by-product of their processes. To improve environmental performance and increase process profitability, a portion of the waste heat can be recovered and employed for power generation by recovery systems. Supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) plants are emerging as potential alternatives to the well-established technologies for waste heat recovery (WHR) power generation in heavy industry. This paper offers a preliminary techno-economic analysis of a waste heat-to-power system based on a sCO2 closed-loop for a heavy-industrial process.By conducting a parametric investigation on the WHR sCO2 system’s key design parameters, a number of preferable configurations from a thermodynamic perspective were initially identified; they were subsequently analyzed from the economic point of view in terms of net present value (NPV) and pay-back period (PBP). The privileged WHR system configuration achieved an overall efficiency of 30.4% and a power output of 21.6 kWe, providing an NPV of almost US k$ 376 with a PBP of approximately 4.5 years.