Optimal Planning of Multi-Carrier Energy Hub System Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The present paper introduces a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to define the optimal combination of the energy hub infrastructures and the optimal scheduling of natural gas energy, wood chips biomass energy and electrical energy that guarantee economical operation of energy hub. Three objective functions are considered during the study: minimizing net present cost, minimizing total CO2 emission and minimizing both net present cost and CO2 emission simultaneously. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of proposed PSO to find the optimal energy hub scheduling. The results show that a natural gas turbine (NGT) is superior to biomass generation unit in reducing the total operating cost. On the other hand, biomass wood chips generator is superior to NGT in reducing total CO2 emission. The results show that using a mix of NGT and biomass generator can enhance the system performance of the energy hub by minimizing both total operating cost and CO2emissions simultaneously.