PRACTICAL APPROACHES FOR THE APPLICATION OF EXERGY COST THEORY TO ENERGY CONVERSION SYSTEMS

The Exergy Cost Theory (ECT) was proposed as a complete and formalized method to account for the exergy cost of system products, defining criteria for optimization and diagnosis purposes. In this paper, different practical approaches for the application of the Exergy Cost Analysis are presented and comparatively applied to the CGAM problem. An emphasis has been specially put on the possible approaches to define and to solve the system of exergy cost balances, including the definition of auxiliary relations and the reallocation of the exergy cost of residues. It is found that the definition of the functional diagram and the numerical solution of the system through Input-Output analysis seems to be preferable with respect to other approaches.