The peer-reviewed paper behind our approach to site-wide energy analysis, co-authored by Lakshmi Vaideeswaran and published in Applied Thermal Engineering.
The paper sets out a systematic method for four things that are usually treated separately: operational optimisation, retrofits, grassroots design, and debottlenecking of total site energy systems. Its analysis tools give guidelines for the cogeneration efficiency achievable at a given site power-to-heat ratio, measured against an idealised utility system.
That last idea is the one that still does the most work in practice. If you know what an ideal utility system would achieve for your site’s particular heat and power demand, you have a benchmark. The gap between that benchmark and what your plant actually achieves is the size of the prize, and it can be established before anyone proposes a single project.
The work was presented at PRES ’99, the 2nd Conference on Process Integration in Budapest, and appeared in the Applied Thermal Engineering special issue that followed.
Written up in plain English
We turned the parts that still matter most into a readable summary: Rethinking how we design plant energy systems.
The full text is under Elsevier copyright, so this page links to the published version rather than hosting a copy.