Case Study Heat Capacity for an Industrial Plant Facility in a Complex

Cogeneration systems are typically used for supplying heat and electricity generation. The main advantages of such systems are energy savings and reduced operational costs. Plants that use cogeneration systems are often equipped with parallel components feeding various internal energy vector networks. The energy consumption of the plant can be improved by selecting suitable operating levels of the various parallel machines and components connected to the cogeneration system. Recently, cogeneration systems have been equipped with comprehensive monitoring systems. With the availability of these monitoring systems, the concept of a computerized procedure capable of recognizing the status of the equipment from the monitoring data to optimize the plant operation has been established. This can lead to significant economic and energy consumption improvements. In this paper, heat capacity of a typical installation is presented and a procedure to optimize energy utilization is developed. The procedure is presented for a cogeneration system based on natural gas engines, hot water boilers and other heat sources. Plant existing condition is taken as a reference condition. To improve system heat capacity, two alternate methods have been proposed and compared with plant existing condition. First option is the use of system available heat sources as a prime heat source and the second option is adding new gas boilers to improve complex heat production and also as a back up heat source to meet peak complex heat demand requirements. General block diagram of the system is presented and discussed. Installation heat load allocation is analyzed.