Thermo-economic evaluation of modifications to a gas power plant with an air bottoming combined cycle

Multigeneration technologies provide a significant potential for efficient, sustainable and economical generation of multiple useful products. A gas turbine with an air bottoming combined cycle is an attractive combined cycle configuration for small scale power generation (less than 50 MW). In this study, eight different hybrid systems are proposed for further heat recovery from a gas turbine with air bottoming combined cycle to generate different useful products including power, fresh water, cooling, hot water, and industrial process heat. For this purpose, an optimized 50 MW gas turbine with air bottoming combined cycle is integrated with several thermodynamic cycles and components such as carbon dioxide transcritical Rankine cycle, water-lithium bromide absorption cooling, ammonia-water absorption refrigeration, thermal vapor compression-multi effect distillation, heat recovery steam generator, and gas (air)-water heat exchanger. The performance of the proposed hybrid configurations is evaluated from both thermodynamic and economic viewpoints. The resulting findings demonstrate that utilization of available waste heats in a gas turbine with air bottoming cycle is beneficial to generate a significant amount of different useful products with a favorable cost. The findings of this study can be useful for development of proposed integrated systems for both residential and industrial applications.