Performance investigation of Kalina cooling cogeneration cycles

Abstract The power and cooling demands are increasing drastically with increase in living stands and population. Kalina cycle system (KCS) is a power cycle and vapor absorption refrigeration (VAR) is a refrigeration cycle operating with zeotropic mixture. In this work, the common features of KCS and VAR are identified and developed a new Kalina cooling cogeneration cycle (KCCC) to generate combined power and cooling from a single plant configuration. The total output from cogeneration is compared with the total generation from the individual plants (KCS and VAR) at low temperature heat source (155−180 °C). To justify the merit of proposed configuration, thermodynamic simulation has been conducted through critical investigation applied to flexible KCCC under varying operating conditions viz. strong solution concentration, source temperature, separator vapor concentration and dephlegmator effectiveness. The generated results are power, refrigeration, combined power and cooling, cycle energy utilization factor (ENUF) and plant ENUF. The power to total output ratio in KCCC once through cycle is considered as a reference to the other cooling cogenerations for the comparison. The highest cycle ENUF (0.39) is resulted with KCCC once through cycle. KCCC split cycle is not recommended because of its lower efficiency (0.18) compared to the non-integrated efficiency (0.21).