Determination of Lower Heating Value of Municipal Solid Waste by Mathematical Analysis of a Plant Production Data from a Real Waste-to-Energy Plant

Peer-reviewed article not indexed in WoS or Scopus

en

Lower heating value (LHV) represents a key parameter influencing performance and economic of any combustion process. This article presents a methodology for determination of LHV of municipal solid waste by processing set of operational data from a real waste-to-energy plant. In the introductory part LHV is evaluated according to the procedures recommended by the Reference document on the Best Available Techniques for Waste Incineration (BREF/BAT). It is discussed the suitability of using the general regresion-based equation for a specific plant with different technological solution of the particular subsystems. This way acquired LHV also served as an initial estimate for subsequent calculation of boiler efficiency. There is strong relationship between LHV and boiler efficiency. Efficiency was calculated by three different methods: direct, indirect and the "modified" indirect method. The first two methods are commonly used in practice. Third method has been developed by the authors as a control mechanism and complementary approach of the first two. Because for each of methods are necessary different input parameters, it is the purpose of this contribution to show how different the results can be obtained. Each method is variously sensitive to any change of the input parameters and this fact is fully utilized to used to precize estimated values of input parameters (especially lower heating value) and to determine possible inaccuracy in their measurment. For this purpose a computational tool has been developed and is introduced in the paper.

heating value, efficiency

2012-08-26

AIDIC Servizi S.r.l.

Milano, Italy

1974-9791

Chemical Engineering Transactions

2012

29

721–726

6