Energetic, economic and environmental (3E) optimization of hydrogen production process from coal-biomass co-gasification based on a novel method of Ordering Preference Targeting at Bi-Ideal Average Solutions (OPTBIAS)

The coal-biomass co-gasification process is environmentally friendly for hydrogen production, yet came by the expense of high cost, hence an appropriate trade-off among the conflicting objectives is pursued. Considering the inconsistent ordering or heavy computational burden for the existing multi-criteria decision-making methods, a novel method of Ordering Preference Targeting at Bi-Ideal Average Solutions (OPTBIAS) is proposed. In this method, the weighted information of the top and bottom third ideal points and the average solution, as well as their relative importance are considered to evaluate the performance of each Pareto-optimal solution. The OPTBIAS is tested on the hydrogen production and the benchmark chemical engineering problems. The results prove that compared with classical methods, OPTBIAS has superiority in simplicity, weight sensitivity and consistency robustness. Moreover, OPTBIAS gives consistent ordering results when utilizing alternative objectives (exergy efficiency VS exergy destruction) with the same physical significance, showing good applicability in the real world.