Energy, exergy, economic, and environmental analysis of an organic Rankine cycle integrating with infectious medical waste incinerator

This work presents the analysis of energy, economic, environmental (3E), and exergy (4E) impacts for verifying a single implication value of renewable energy technology. An infectious medical waste incinerator combined with an organic Rankine cycle with R-245fa as working fluid is investigated the overall impacts. The experimental energy result are used to analyze an exergy efficiency of the quality level, a life cycle assessment (LCA) under the environmental effect, a levelized cost of the economic perspective, and a 4E decision score. The study results implied that the organic Rankine cycle-incinerator system could manage a refuse-derived fuel type 3 (RDF-3) of 184.42 kg/h from infectious medical waste to produce 23.65 kW(e) of power at an energy efficiency 0.91%, with at the same time, an exergy efficiency was approximately 0.89%. The LCA was characterized with the use of steel at a single score of approximately 0.00035Pt. The economic value was implied from a levelized energy cost of 0.153 USD/kWh under the 3E model, which was lower than that of a Feed-in Tariff (FiT) model for the solid-waste power plant in Thailand of 0.209 USD/kWh. A levelized exergy costing per life cycle assessment of 0.0000986 USD Pt/kWh(2) was investigated under the 4E model.