Final year projects (Baccalaureus Theses) (Industrial Engineering)

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Browsing Final year projects (Baccalaureus Theses) (Industrial Engineering) by Subject "Environment"

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    Life cycle assessment of the brayton cycle in a combined cycle hybrid solar central receiver power plant
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2011-12) Le Clus, Jeanne; Van Schalkwyk, Theuns Dirkse; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Industrial Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In the past decade global concern for energy security and the negative environmental impacts caused by fossil fuels has caused the global power industry to become more focused in a search for alternative energy sources and solutions. The need for renewable, sustainable green energy sources to reduce the long term impacts caused by current pollution is becoming evident and unavoidable. A promising solution proposes utilizing energy harnessed from the sun; it is clean, abundant and renewable (Bensebaa, 2010). There are different ways of introducing solar thermal energy into fossil fuel fired power generating plants currently in operation, presenting a partial or complete alternative to reduce or replace the usage of fossil fuels (Popov, 2011). The Department of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at Stellenbosch University is currently involved in the evaluation and development of different solar thermal power generating plants (Ficker, 2011). One of these plants, the model on which this project is based, is a hybrid combined cycle solar central receiver. This model utilizes a combined cycle referred to as the Stellenbosch University Solar Power Thermodynamic (SUNSPOT) cycle. This project addresses the Brayton cycle, the first cycle in the SUNSPOT combined cycle concept. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was chosen as the environmental sustainability technique to determine the impacts which the Brayton cycle will have on the environment. A Gate-to-Grave LCA has been conducted on the Brayton cycle, thus taking the operational life of the cycle as well as the disposal of its components into account. GaBi software has been used as environmental sustainability tool to conduct the LCA. Interpreting the GaBi output showed that the global warming potential (GWP) is the indicator of the most significant environmental impacts of the Brayton cycle, thus the CO2 emissions of the power plant are compared with several fossil fuelled power plants. It became clear that a hybrid solar combined cycle power plant has much lower carbon dioxide emissions than a conventional fossil fuel power plant. Notably, unlike solo solar thermal power plants, the carbon emissions are not small enough to be seen as negligible.