Performance investigation of a new cooling, heating and power system with methanol decomposition based chemical recuperation process

Highlights: • A new CCHP system with a chemical recuperation process is proposed. • The system performances are evaluated by deploying it to a shopping center. • Favorable system annual energy efficiency of 58.05% is achieved. A novel combined cooling, heating and power system, which mainly consists of an internal combustion engine power block with the capacity of 500 kW_e, a chemical recuperation block, an absorption refrigeration block and a hot water supply block, is proposed to improve the energy conversion efficiency in this work. The high temperature exhaust gas from the internal combustion engine is first used to drive methanol decomposition to produce syngas of CO and H₂ via the chemical recuperation, and the produced syngas is fed into the ICE for power generation. The exit exhaust gas flows into a double-effect lithium bromide-water absorption refrigerator, and finally the rest of the gas sensible heat is used to generate hot water for district heating. The temperature of the exhaust gas reduces to approximately 280 °C by the chemical recuperation process, and the temperature difference between the heat resource and the absorption cooling requirement thereby decreases and leads to lower exergy loss. Numerical simulation results indicate that the developed combined cooling, heating and power system achieves favorable thermodynamic performances, and the matching characteristics between energy production and energy demand can be enhanced. The system annual averaged energy efficiency is increased to 58.05%, and the methanol consumption is reduced to 842.54 tons/year with an annual primary energy saving ratio of 9.75%. Additionally, the system achieves lower annual total cost, i.e., 538.95 k$. The research findings provide a promising method to improve the performances of the combined cooling, heating and power system.