The energy performance of vacuum evaporators for liquid digestate treatment in biogas plants
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Date
2018-03-01
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Mark
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PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
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Abstract
Vacuum evaporation is an efficient method for reducing the volume of liquid digestate (LD) from biogas
plants (BGP). Furthermore, thickening LD in BGP contributes to the efficient utilization of waste heat and
also reduces fossil fuel consumption that is needed for transporting LD. However, the utilization of
vacuum evaporation must be reasonable, and a comprehensive study should precede the integration of
evaporation technology in a particular BGP. For this purpose, this study compares selected parameters of
three types of industrial evaporators which may be suitable for LD thickening. Furthermore, this study
provides a mathematical model that describes the mass and energy balances of the chosen evaporators
and is able to evaluate their energy performance for a given set of input variables.
It was concluded that the forced-circulation evaporator has the highest energy requirements and also
requires a high cooling performance. This type of evaporator will be interesting for the plant owners only
if the cost of power generation is extremely low. In terms of consumption of energy and cooling duty, the
multi-stage flash evaporator is the most efficient and it also requires the least heat transfer area. The
falling-film evaporator provides only slightly worse performance.
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Citation
Energy. 2018, issue 146, p. 141-155.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217311337
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217311337
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Peer-reviewed
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en
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/