Black liquor, a residual stream from the Kraft recovery process of paper mills is an incipient biomass energy resource which finds prospective biofuel-based industrial applications to ensure process self-sufficiency and sustainability. Black liquor is concentrated using Multiple Stage Evaporator, the utmost energy intensive unit, before using it as biofuel. Pertaining to the contemporary global energy scenario, improvement in energy efficiency of Multiple Stage Evaporator becomes indispensable. The present work investigates the non-linear modeling and simulation-based optimization of Heptads' stage based Multiple Stage Evaporator in backward feed flow configuration integrated with various energy saving strategies. A novel metaheuristic approach, Water Cycle Algorithm has been employed to search the optimum estimates of unknown process variables and therefore, the optimum energy efficiency parameters. The optimization results demonstrate the efficiency of Water Cycle Algorithm in screening the most appropriate operating strategy, i.e., hybrid model of all energy saving strategies (steam-split, feed-split and feed-preheating) with optimum energy efficiency i.e. Steam Economy of 7.092 and Steam Consumption of 1.919 kg/s. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the results with previous literature and real-time plant estimates reveal that the hybrid model offers improvement of 52.84% in Steam Economy and reduction in Steam Consumption by 28.13% when compared to the real plant data.
Keywords: Biofuel; Computing methodology; Energy; Energy economics; Energy optimization; Energy saving strategies; Energy sustainability; Multiple Stage Evaporator; Renewable energy resources; Steam consumption; Steam economy; Water Cycle Algorithm.
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