UGM students Vincentius Adven Brilliant (Mechanical Engineering), Sasa Aulia (Engineering Physics), Farah Octaviani (Engineering Physics), and Tariq Arian Khalfani (Engineering Physics) were announced paper winners at the Purnomo Yusgiantoro Center (PYC) International Energy Conference 2021. The paper competition, along with the photo, infographic, and essay contests, is part of the pre-event prior to the biennial international energy conference.
According to team leader Adven, the ten best paper winners in this competition came from various layers of students, practitioners, and government institutions, such as the ASEAN Center for Energy (ACE), the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology, Bandung Institute of Technology, and others. The jury for the paper competition consists of experts in the field, namely Dr. Sandy Kerr (Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom), Dr. Evita H. Legowo (Swiss German University, Indonesia), and Sarjiya, Ph.D. (Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia).
The team’s paper Integrated Wastewater and Waste Heat Recovery System in Coal-Fired Power Plants Using Reverse Osmosis to Produce Clean Water and Increase Thermal Efficiency proposed a system to address the clean water crisis and optimize the use of fossil energy.
According to Adven, the boiler blowdown wastewater, which still has high temperature and pressure, is flowed into the heat exchanger to increase the temperature of the boiler feedwater, thus increasing the thermal efficiency by 0.4%. It is then fed to the Pelton turbine to generate electricity and mixed with the cooling tower blowdown. The mixture of these two is then purified with Reverse Osmosis to produce clean water of 162 kL/h.
“The residue from Reverse Osmosis is channeled to the electrolysis unit to be converted into hydrogen and oxygen by utilizing the electrical energy produced by the Pelton turbine. This system can help solve two problems at once, namely the clean water crisis and the efficiency of fossil energy,” said Adven, Wednesday (13/10).
Adven said that waste heat recovery was one of his expertise, and thus he enjoyed writing this paper with the team. He hopes the team’s idea can inspire the community to consider fossil energy as part of the solution to clean water provision.
Author: Desy