A preliminary comparative performance evaluation of highly efficient Waste-to-Energy plants

When looking for sustainable energy systems, Waste-to-Energy plants play a relevant role. Therefore performance evaluation of these plants in order to increase their efficiency is of great relevance to the field of engineering. In the present paper, highly efficient Waste-to-Energy plants are modeled and analyzed from the thermodynamic and technological points of view. Four existing plants constructed in Amsterdam/the Netherlands, Reo Nord/Denmark, Brescia/Italy and Germany were considered. The different methods aiming at increasing the efficiency adopted in these plants have been discussed and compared by using available data in the literature. The performance evaluation was carried out using a proprietary code developed at Politecnico di Milano. A sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the effects of the plant size, condenser pressure, oxygen content and flue gas temperature at boiler exit on the efficiency of the plants. The results show that adopting a new configuration for steam cycle increases the efficiency of the plant, thus also reducing the corrosion of boiler tubes. It is also demonstrated that the proposed configuration leads to a net lower heating value efficiency of 33%. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.