A Novel Integrated System Driven by Allam Cycle for the Simultaneous Energy, Water, and Waste Management

Energy and water are indispensable to human activities and economic growth, especially with increasing energy and water security concerns in the coming years. In addition, with fast urbanization, how to deal with huge amounts of urban sewage becomes critical to achieve a sustainable future. Simultaneous management of energy, water, and waste could potentially increase the techno-economic-environmental performance of the integrated system. Recently, an oxy-combustion power cycle (the Allam cycle) has attracted increasing attention because of its near-zero emissions and high thermal efficiency, while supercritical CO2 (sCO2) extraction is a promising technology for wastewater treatment. The presented work proposes a novel Allam cycle-driven system integrated with a Multi-Effect Desalination unit (MED) in order to provide power and fresh water. The sCO2 produced in the Allam cycle is used in a Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), and this can decrease the operating costs of the STP. Energy and exergy analysis is carried out for the proposed system using the Engineering Equation Solver (EES) and MATLAB. Finally, in order to evaluate the effect that the decision variables have on each of the objectives, a comprehensive parametric study is conducted. The analysis indicates that the inlet temperature and pressure of the gas turbine and the number of effects in the MED are the main factors influencing the objective functions.