A novel cryogenic condensation system combined with gas turbine with low carbon emission for volatile compounds recovery

The issue of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is a global concern due to its significant influence on environmental pollution, climate change, and human health. Condensation is an available VOCs recovery method, but it currently has obvious shortcomings in terms of energy consumption, carbon emissions, refrigerants, and emission concentration. In this paper, a novel VOCs condensation system combined with gas turbine was proposed. The heat obtained by burning part of the exhaust gas is employed to drive an absorption refrigerator using ammonia water and a Stirling refrigerator using helium to recover VOCs contained in the remaining exhaust gas, which has the advantages of not requiring an external power supply, low carbon emissions, using natural refrigerant and nearly zero-VOCs emission. In order to obtain the optimal recovery efficiency, a thermodynamic calculation model was established, and related experimental verifications were carried out. The results show that the remaining 93.3% of the VOCs can be recovered by burning 6.7% of the VOCs when the absorption refrigerator (213 K) recovers the waste heat of the gas turbine used to power the Stirling refrigerator (110 K). The carbon emission reduction efficiency is as high as 92.9% and the carbon emission reduction is 16707 tons per year. The effects of the refrigeration temperature, heat source temperature, gas turbine efficiency, refrigerator efficiency and exhaust gas flowrate on the recovery efficiency were also analyzed.