Ruonan Li
Ph.D. Candidate
Supervised by Dr. Vladimir Mahalec and Dr. Prashant Mhaskar
Integrated Community Energy Systems
lir58@mcmaster.ca | JHE-296
MACC Researcher since September 2019
Department of Chemical Engineering
Education
B.Eng. Chemical Engineering. McMaster University (2019)
Research Title
Distributed energy system based on CCHP systems of buildings and light industrial plants
Research Objectives
Individual combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) system has a high possibility to be integrated and investigated from a larger scale. With energy generation, entities with CCHP units can deliver energy to the nearby buildings; therefore, form the distributed energy network. Each entity performs as a node in the network. Through heating and electricity transfer among nodes, the amount of fuel and grid electricity usage can be diminished. Currently, research on CCHP systems is mainly at the building level. A few studies investigate CCHP systems from a larger scale. Furthermore, there is a lack of study on the energy transfer system combining residential, commercial buildings, and industrial plants. The main goal of the research is proposing such a distributed energy network model, which includes residential buildings and industrial plants. Then identify whether the integrated configuration provides environmental and economic benefits. The second goal is obtaining the design and operation of the CCHP systems. Meanwhile, identify the industry production amount, energy transfer among entities, and the size of the energy transfer pipe. It has been achieved by developing the model as an optimization problem, which minimizes both the greenhouse gas emission and the annual total cost of the whole system.