Power production Enhancement of Hybrid Geothermal Power Plant Using Biomass Energy: Design and Simulation

In this paper, the integration of a biomass gasification process with a geothermal power plant is investigated. The purpose of this study is to enhance the effective power of the geothermal plant turbine by supersaturating the output steam from the geothermal well by using the excess heat of the biomass gasification process. In this regard, a geothermal power plant with a production capacity of 2.8 MW was selected as a case study and simulated in Aspen Plus software. Then a biomass gasification process was simulated using the binary fluid bed method in this software. Finally, a hybrid system including the geothermal power plant and the biomass gasification unit was designed and simulated. For this purpose, 3.9 kg/s saturated steam was extracted from the geothermal well and supersaturated by the excess heat from the gasification process with a biomass flow rate of 31950 kg/s. The amount of syngas produced in this process as a by-product is 34353.9 kg/hr. The results showed that geothermal process efficiency increased from 15.7% to 29.5% and production capacity under the same operating conditions increased from 2.8MW upgraded to 3.6 MW.