Design and thermo-enviro-economic analyses of a novel thermal design process for a CCHP-desalination application using LNG regasification integrated with a gas turbine power plant

Designing and studying processes with reduced thermodynamic irreversibility and environmental impact is imperative to improve the global applicability of the stand-alone gas turbine cycles. Hence, the present study introduces a novel cascade heat integration tool for a gas turbine cycle combined with a liquefied natural gas cold energy utilization and regasification process. A saltwater desalination subsystem, an absorption chiller, and an organic Rankine cycle are also included in the integrated system. Therefore, the developed system demonstrates an environmentally friendly combined cooling, heating, power, and freshwater production framework, improving the performance of the system in comparison to previous research. This configuration is simulated within the Aspen HYSYS software for comprehensive energy, exergy, environmental, and economic assessments. The findings demonstrate that the whole configuration yields energy and exergy efficiencies of 92.92% and 63.5%, respectively. In comparison, these efficiencies in the single-generation mode are found to be 45.92% and 43.72%, correspondingly. The environmental analysis reveals that the carbon dioxide footprint equals 0.1792 kg/kWh when operating in the multigeneration mode and 0.4591 kg/kWh in the single-generation mode. Furthermore, the economic evaluation exhibits that the cost of energy equals 67.2 $/MWh and 135.92 $/MWh for the multigeneration and single-generation operational modes, respectively.