scholarly journals Life Cycle Assessment of a Reversible Heat Pump–Organic Rankine Cycle–Heat Storage System with Geothermal Heat Supply

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 3253
Author(s):  
Daniel Scharrer ◽  
Bernd Eppinger ◽  
Pascal Schmitt ◽  
Johan Zenk ◽  
Peter Bazan ◽  
...  

The life cycle assessment of components is becoming increasingly important for planning and construction. In this paper, a novel storage technology for excess electricity consisting of a heat pump, a heat storage and an organic rankine cycle is investigated with regards to its environmental impact. Waste heat is exergetically upgraded, stored in a hot water storage unit and afterwards reconverted to electricity when needed. Such a pilot plant on a lab scale is currently built in Germany. The first part of this paper focuses on geothermal energy as a potential heat source for the storage system and its environmental impact. For a large scale application, geothermal hotspots in Germany are further investigated. The second part analyzes the storage technology itself and compares it to the impacts of commonly used battery storage technologies. Especially during the manufacturing process, significantly better global warming potential values are shown compared to lithium-ion and lead batteries. The least environmental impact while operating the system is with wind power, which suggests an implementation of the storage system into the grid in the northern part of Germany.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 5322
Author(s):  
Gabriel Zsembinszki ◽  
Noelia Llantoy ◽  
Valeria Palomba ◽  
Andrea Frazzica ◽  
Mattia Dallapiccola ◽  
...  

The buildings sector is one of the least sustainable activities in the world, accounting for around 40% of the total global energy demand. With the aim to reduce the environmental impact of this sector, the use of renewable energy sources coupled with energy storage systems in buildings has been investigated in recent years. Innovative solutions for cooling, heating, and domestic hot water in buildings can contribute to the buildings’ decarbonization by achieving a reduction of building electrical consumption needed to keep comfortable conditions. However, the environmental impact of a new system is not only related to its electrical consumption from the grid, but also to the environmental load produced in the manufacturing and disposal stages of system components. This study investigates the environmental impact of an innovative system proposed for residential buildings in Mediterranean climate through a life cycle assessment. The results show that, due to the complexity of the system, the manufacturing and disposal stages have a high environmental impact, which is not compensated by the reduction of the impact during the operational stage. A parametric study was also performed to investigate the effect of the design of the storage system on the overall system impact.


Energy ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 144-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Liu ◽  
Chao He ◽  
Hong Gao ◽  
Hui Xie ◽  
Yourong Li ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 3820
Author(s):  
Noelia Llantoy ◽  
Gabriel Zsembinszki ◽  
Valeria Palomba ◽  
Andrea Frazzica ◽  
Mattia Dallapiccola ◽  
...  

With the aim of contributing to achieving the decarbonization of the energy sector, the environmental impact of an innovative system to produce heating and domestic hot water for heating demand-dominated climates is assessed is evaluated. The evaluation is conducted using the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and the ReCiPe and IPCC GWP indicators for the manufacturing and operation stages, and comparing the system to a reference one. Results show that the innovative system has a lower overall impact than the reference one. Moreover, a parametric study to evaluate the impact of the refrigerant is carried out, showing that the impact of the overall systems is not affected if the amount of refrigerant or the impact of refrigerant is increased.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 4146
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Jachura ◽  
Robert Sekret

This paper presents an environmental impact assessment of the entire cycle of existence of the tube-vacuum solar collector prototype. The innovativeness of the solution involved using a phase change material as a heat-storing material, which was placed inside the collector’s tubes-vacuum. The PCM used in this study was paraffin. The system boundaries contained three phases: production, operation (use phase), and disposal. An ecological life cycle assessment was carried out using the SimaPro software. To compare the environmental impact of heat storage, the amount of heat generated for 15 years, starting from the beginning of a solar installation for preparing domestic hot water for a single-family residential building, was considered the functional unit. Assuming comparable production methods for individual elements of the ETC and waste management scenarios, the reduction in harmful effects on the environment by introducing a PCM that stores heat inside the ETC ranges from 17 to 24%. The performed analyses have also shown that the method itself of manufacturing the materials used for the construction of the solar collector and the choice of the scenario of the disposal of waste during decommissioning the solar collector all play an important role in its environmental assessment. With an increase in the application of the advanced technologies of materials manufacturing and an increase in the amount of waste subjected to recycling, the degree of the solar collector’s environmental impact decreased by 82% compared to its standard manufacture and disposal.


2018 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 01012
Author(s):  
Dominika Matuszewska ◽  
Marta Kuta ◽  
Jan Górski

This paper details the development of a systematic methodology to integrated life cycle assessment (LCA) with thermo-economic models and to thereby identify the optimal exploitation schemes of geothermal resources. Overall geothermal systems consist of a superstructure of geothermal exploitable resources, a superstructure of conversion technology and multiple demand profiles for Swiss city. In this paper, an enhanced geothermal system has been chosen as exploitable resources. The energy conversion technology used in modelling is an organic Rankine cycle, which can be used to supply heat and electricity. In the Swiss case four demand profiles periods are considered: summer, interseason, winter and extreme winter, the city Nyon serving for the example case study. The multi-objective optimization system, that uses an evolutionary algorithm, is employed to determine the optimal scheme for some of the prepared models, with exergy efficiency and environmental impact as objectives.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisha Kathleen Hunter

Ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems are an extremely efficient space heating and cooling technology. There is a large consensus throughout the literature that GSHP systems can reduce operational CO2 emissions by up to 80% in comparison to natural gas furnace (GF) and air conditioner (AC) systems. The literature is limited; however, in regards to the specific environmental impacts associated with the systems, as well as the impacts that occur throughout the systems’ entire life cycle. In this project, a comparative life cycle assessment was conducted to compare a GSHP system with a GF/AC system, examining 14 specific environmental impact categories. Results were consistent with the literature in regards to the operational stage; however the GSHP system displayed a significantly greater overall environmental impact. While these results are specific to the region of Ontario, Canada, they call into question the prevailing opinion that GSHPs are the more environmentally sustainable option.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Moore ◽  
Tania Urmee ◽  
Martin Anda ◽  
Elaine Walker

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alisha Kathleen Hunter

Ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems are an extremely efficient space heating and cooling technology. There is a large consensus throughout the literature that GSHP systems can reduce operational CO2 emissions by up to 80% in comparison to natural gas furnace (GF) and air conditioner (AC) systems. The literature is limited; however, in regards to the specific environmental impacts associated with the systems, as well as the impacts that occur throughout the systems’ entire life cycle. In this project, a comparative life cycle assessment was conducted to compare a GSHP system with a GF/AC system, examining 14 specific environmental impact categories. Results were consistent with the literature in regards to the operational stage; however the GSHP system displayed a significantly greater overall environmental impact. While these results are specific to the region of Ontario, Canada, they call into question the prevailing opinion that GSHPs are the more environmentally sustainable option.


Agronomy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1230
Author(s):  
Cristina Decano-Valentin ◽  
In-Bok Lee ◽  
Uk-Hyeon Yeo ◽  
Sang-Yeon Lee ◽  
Jun-Gyu Kim ◽  
...  

A substantial reduction in the environmental impacts related to the construction and operation of agricultural buildings is needed to adapt to the continuing development of agriculture. The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to quantify the environmental impact of different processes involved in the production and therefore has been increasingly applied to assess the environmental burden. However, most LCA-related research studies have focused on the overall environmental impact of the entire system without considering the energy load of the agricultural buildings. By integrating the LCA tool with other design tools such as the building energy simulation (BES), the identification of environmental hotspots and the mitigation options become possible during the design process. Thus, the objective of the paper was to identify the current integration approaches used to combine BES and LCA results to assess the environmental impact of different heating systems such as absorption heat pump (AHP) using energy from thermal effluent, electricity-powered heat pump and kerosene-powered boilers used in a conventional multi-span Korean greenhouse. The assessment result revealed that the environmental impact caused using a kerosene-powered boiler is largest in terms of the acidification potential (AP), global warming potential (GWP) and Eutrophication Potential (EP) of 1.15 × 100 kg SO2-eq, 1.13 × 102 kg CO2-eq and 1.62 × 10−1 kg PO4-eq, respectively. Detailed analysis of the result showed that the main contributor for greenhouse gas emission was caused by the type, amount and source of energy used to heat the greenhouse, which contributed to a maximum of 86.59% for case 1, 96.69% for case 2 and a maximum of 96.47% for case 3, depending on the type of greenhouse gas being considered.


Author(s):  
Aida Farsi ◽  
Marc A. Rosen

AbstractAn analysis is reported of a geothermal-based electricity-freshwater system in which an organic Rankine cycle is integrated with a multi-effect distillation desalination unit. The system is driven by geothermal hot water extracted from the production well. Mass, energy, entropy, and exergy rate balances are written for all system components, as are energy and exergy efficiency expressions for each subsystem. The exergy destruction rate associated with the temperature and chemical disequilibrium of the freshwater and brine with the reference environment are taken into account to reveal accurate results for irreversibility sources within the desalination process. The developed thermodynamic model is simulated using thermodynamic properties of the working fluids (i.e., ammonia, seawater, distillate, and brine) at each state point. A sustainability analysis is performed that connects exergy and environmental impact concepts. That assessment expresses the extent of the contribution of the system to sustainable development and reduced environmental impact, using exergy methods. Results of the sustainability analysis indicate that, with an increase in the reference environment temperature from 20 to 35 $$^\circ{\rm C}$$ ∘ C , the exergy destruction rate decreases for the multi-effect distillation and organic Rankine cycle systems respectively from 6474 to 4217 kW and from 16,270 to 13,459 kW. Also, the corresponding sustainability index for the multi-effect distillation and organic Rankine cycle systems increases from 1.16 to 1.2 and 1.5–1.6, respectively, for the same increase in reference environment temperature.


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