Development of a Simplex Optimization Technique for Biogas Generation of Electrical Energy

Abstract

Biogas energy production is a key technology in the development of sustainable energy supply systems aiming at covering the energy demand using renewable sources. The production can be achieved with anaerobic digestion.This paper developsa simplex optimization model for biogas energy generation. The bio-digester used to generate the biogas energy in this work is animal manure because of availability of the materials. The simplex optimization model was then developed by adding a slack variable to the biogas model in order to find a value of the decision variable for the model. This was done to find a value of the decision variable where all the constraints are fulfilled. When a feasible basic solution wasfound, the algorithm sought from new vertex to find the optimal solution. The next vertex was chosen such that the search direction was in the steepest feasible direction. The developed simplex optimization model was then used to optimize the full-scale of the biogas energy. A simplexoptimization model for biogas energy generation with a coefficient of -1.1733 and 20.639 (R square value of -0.073) was developed.The resultsshowed that the total biogas energy generated before optimization were 636.6MW and 889.49MW after optimization. The biogas energy generation was increasedby 252.89MW, which was 39.7% increase after optimization. The results showed the applicability of the optimization model which can be exploited using optimal control scheme. The outcome of the optimization result indicates that the developed model is a useful mechanism yielding an economical solution on one hand and increase in renewable energy contribution on the other.

Keywords: Biogas Energy Production, Computer Simulation, Simplex Optimization, Renewable Energy, Anaerobic Digestion, Coefficient of Polynomial.