Abstract:
With the drastic change in global climate and increase in environmental pollution, the awareness of environmental concerns has also increased. Due to this, the demand for clean energy production is also increasing day by day. To fulfill the global clean energy requirement, hydrogen as a fuel is being considered a remarkable alternative to fossil fuels. In its most flawless structure, there are zero emissions, the supply is unending, and production. However, the major issue is the transportation of hydrogen gas.
To overcome the issue, different LOHCs (liquid organic hydrogen career) have been introduced. LOHC is used to absorb the hydrogen gas by hydrogenation process and can be extracted by dehydrogenation process. In the hydrogenation, reacts with hydrogen in the presence of the catalyst and forms the methyl-cyclohexane (MCH), a major gas carrier. MCH is in liquid form and can be transported easily. Subsequently, dehydrogenation of MCH is carried out to produce toluene and hydrogen gas. Hydrogen can be then used for the respective purpose.
The hydrogenation and dehydrogenation processes are carried out by using an appropriate catalyst. The hydrogenation process is exothermic, and a lot of heat is evolved during the process. This heat can be utilized to carry out the dehydrogenation reaction. The key objective of the study is to optimize heat integrated MCH/toluene dehydrogenation system by selecting optimal amounts of the decision variables and constraints to enhance thermodynamic efficiency, hence making it cost effective by reducing the total heat utility of the system.
In this remarkable study, Aspen HYSYS ® V11 is used to develop the model of the MCH/toluene heat integrated system. After the successful development of the model, MATLAB 2021a is used to write the script of the algorithm. Teaching-learning-selfstudy-optimization (TLSO) algorithm is used for the optimization of the process. After
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the optimization of the process, effective results are compared with the previous study, and the achievements are well reported.