Development and assessment of renewable ammonia and methanol production systems

In this thesis, four renewable energy-based integrated systems for sustainable communities are developed. System 1 consists of a single-stage OTEC plant integrated with an ammonia production and district cooling system. Two different operation cases of the analyzed system are considered, where for the first case 50% of the power produced is used to produce ammonia as an energy storage medium. The second case considers the power production system integrated with district cooling system. The highest energy and exergy efficiencies are found to be 1.37% and 56.17% for case 1, respectively. As for the case 2 the maximum energy and exergy efficiency of the OTEC plant is found to be 1.83% and 78.02% respectively. System 2 consists of wind turbines and solar PV units for power production. The plant integrates a power production system with a district cooling and ammonia synthesis system. The system provides 40% of the system produced to the ammonia synthesis system. Ammonia is used as an energy storage medium. The maximum energy and exergy efficiencies of the system are found to be 21.2% and 21.3%. System 3 is a trigeneration system, that consists of a two-stage Rankine cycle that integrated with an electrolytic cation exchange membrane (ECEM) reactor for carbon dioxide and hydrogen production to feed the methanol production system. The system performance is analysed under three different cases: case 1: ECEM reactor operates at its current efficiency with fuel production and district cooling being the only products, case 2: ECEM reactor operates at proton exchange membrane (PEM) efficiency, and case 3: Only power is produced with no fuel. The maximum overall energy efficiencies of the cycle are found to be 8.0, 8.6, and 7.3% for cases 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Finally, system 4 takes into consideration a novel integration of a thermal management system integrated within a bifacial PV module. The bifacial modules are assessed for offshore use. The modules are able to boil ammonia at a pressure of 8.97 bar under a temperature of -5oC and a peak solar irradiance of 620 W/m2