At first an overview of the University of Pisa research activities in the field of thermal machines and energy systems will be provided. The research lines are wide, ranging from modelling of complex energy systems via dedicated process engineering software, to devices detailed geometry studies with computational fluid dynamics as well as experimental activities. Among the technologies, we do study innovative thermodynamic cycles (e.g., supercritical CO2, Oxy-combustion such as Allam power cycle or chemical looping combustion), energy storage technologies (Carnot batteries, Liquid Air Energy Storage - LAES, Redox Flow Batteries) and other energy conversion technologies such as Liquefied Natural Gas - LNG, biomass gasification, water electrolysis. The idea is to be capable to assess the performances, suggest improvements considering the implementation as well and finally measure the economic impact in the whole life of the technology. The core of the seminar will follow and go deeper in one of our research lines, namely the optimal design and operation of multi-energy systems showing adopted methodologies and some of the applications.
The integration of different energy vectors, ranging from generation to consumption via transmission/distribution and storage, is an effective way to reduce primary energy consumption thus carbon dioxide emissions. Such multi-energy systems, make rational use of primary energy managing simultaneously electric/mechanical power, heat, refrigeration needs and other commodities. We will mainly focus on the energy conversion units, several are suitable for multi-energy applications, ranging from internal combustion engines to gas-steam turbine combined cycles for the more conventional ones or electric driven heat pumps as well as hydrogen driven fuel cells. These units can have more than one independent operative variable, highly nonlinear performance curves describing their off-design behavior, limitations or penalizations affecting their start-up/shut-down operations. Performance may also depend on ambient temperature and may be integrated with variable renewable energy sources as well as electric, heat and cooling storage. In addition, national and European Union incentive policies come into play and exert constraints that are often imposed on long term balances, e.g., yearly, that need to be taken into account when designing such systems.
Due to the large number of decision variables and the necessity of determining trade-off solutions, the design planning of multi-energy systems, consisting of several units, requires the adoption of operations research state of the art methods and development of ah-hoc heuristic. The seminar will give an overview of how these challenges have been tackled via Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) model and two-stage optimization algorithm for determining the most profitable design comprehensive of energy storage while considering the optimal scheduling of the units over the year. Current and perspective activities stemming from this family of problems will be mentioned, opening the floor to future developments discussions.
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