Improving water and energy efficiency of power plant through absorption heat pump.

This paper presents a new approach for power plants to recovering waste heat contained in the flue gas using absorption heat pump technology while reducing water through reducing cooling tower capacity by a closed chilled water loop, in which the chilled water is obtained from and absorption heat pumps operated using waste heat. Hot water driven absorption heat pumps are selected to introduce the proposed approach and as the baseline configuration to study the technical feasibility. The proposed system was modelled in EES and Sorpsim, a newly developed modular/scalable modelling framework for sorption based technologies, to illustrate the thermal efficiency improvement and also water savings they attain. An overall system performance and economic analysis are provided for decision-making and as the evidence of potential benefits. The approach in the paper provides a pathway to achieving high-efficiency for power generation and significant water savings.