Energy and exergy analysis of the impact of biomass moisture content on performance of an integrated pulp & paper mill - Power plant

The last few decades world has attempted to convert energy sources from non-renewable energy sources to renewable energy, nevertheless, the growth rate of world energy consumption is still higher than the procurement of renewable energy generation facilities. Increasing power plant efficiency is surely will help to reduce the dependency of fossil fuel. An integrated pulp and paper mill - power plant is using co-firing system to generate its power by having 6 different biomass (coal, bark, palm shell, EFB, brown fiber and effluent sludge) which most of them have high moisture content. This work aimed to study the actual current performance of power plant and see improvement that can be obtained by reducing moisture content of effluent sludge with variation 60, 50, 40, 30, 20 and 10. According to the analysis, it is found that current overall energy and exergy efficiency of power plant is 55.9 and 19.26. Overall exergy efficiency is increased by 1 by reduce effluent sludge moisture content from 60 to 10. © 2024 Author(s).