A microalgal biogas driven multigenerational system developed for producing power, freshwater and hydrogen

This research has developed a novel integrated system that uses biomass energy from microalgae and conducted in-depth thermodynamic modelling and analysis. Using all locally available potential renewable energy sources and generating the useful energy outputs to cover the community needs while minimizing the environmental damage to the ecosystem are more important than ever as the effects of global warming have got much more adverse. Regarding this particular study, the suggested multigenerational microalgae and wheat strains biomass system is developed to generate electricity, freshwater and hydrogen without any energy needs from fossil fuels, and the present system stores both electricity and hydrogen for use at a electric vehicle (EV) charging station and a hydrogen refueling station. The energy and exergy efficiencies, exergy destruction rates for individual system components, thermophysical properties and subsystem capacities are all analysed and assessed using the Engineering Equation Solver software. The results confirm that the present system produces a total of 2372.564 kW of electricity, a capacity of 2900.16 kg/day of freshwater, a capacity of 84.35 kg/day of hydrogen and a capacity of 302 kg/day of biogas by employing biomass source as a renewable energy input. Furthermore, the majority of exergy destructions occurs in the combustion chamber and the anaerobic digester. Moreover, some parametric studies are performed to investigate how varying the reference temperature (from 10 to 35 °C) influences the efficiencies and exergy destructions and how different compression ratios (such as, 9, 18, 27 and 36) affect the overall system performance in general and the Brayton cycle's exergy efficiencies in specific. The system's overall energy and exergy efficiencies are determined as 52.6% and 41.7%, respectively.