Energy and exergy analyses of novel coal and municipal solid waste gasification processes

Nowadays fossil fuels provide a significant majority of the world’s energy supply, and this situation is predicted to last for the following decades. However, utilization of fossil fuels also causes increasingly critical environmental problems, such as air pollution resulted from airborne particulate materials and greenhouse effects mainly brought about by higher carbon dioxide emissions. Therefore, it is of great importance to mitigate these issues related to fossil fuels, through technology development. Process assessment by energy and exergy analyses is an important tool to assess the feasibility of potential technologies to achieve this goal. This thesis aims to gain a better understanding of several proposed processes through the energy balance analysis and exergy destruction calculation for each operational unit, so as to identify the potential efficiency improvement and take corresponding measures. The implementation of the energy saving measures can assist enterprises minimise their energy resources and save significant operational costs, which advances the sustainable development of the enterprises and related industries. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. carbon dioxide) could be significantly reduced, thus helping to alleviate the issue of global warming brought about by such emissions.