Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the manuscript, a trigeneration system is proposed, combining a gas turbine power cycle with inter cooling, ammonia-water absorption refrigeration and hot water production. The proposed trigeneration system has been analyzed from the points of view of energy efficiency and economy. In addition, an investigation of the effects of the input variables on the output data was performed. 

 

The major concerns I have with the text in the current state are: 

 

1. The scientific content of the article can be questioned because no real data (or possibly already published) were used to validate the simulations of the proposed system. As such, the author could explore the results of different works to validate the synthetic experiment. 

 

2. The problem statement could be further enhanced. In the Introduction section, the author could include more specific references to works that performed this type of analysis (without data collection). That would help to support the work done to the broad international audience of Sustainability.

 

3. Section 3 Mathematical modeling: This section should be carefully organized. If authors include the units of variables immediately after the equations, readers will be able to reproduce models faster.

 

4. Table 7 was not analyzed. What are your findings from this table?

 

5. A section describing how the sensitivity analysis was performed is missing.

 

6. What are the practical implications of this work? Discuss the threats to the validity of a real-world application.

 

Minor comments:

 

Line 202: Variables must be declared at their first appearance in the text. See COP.

 

References: Refs. no. 4, 10, 26 and 30 appear to be incomplete.

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, the performance and economics of a trigeneration system are investigated. The paper is well-organized and written clearly. The findings can be very useful to the community. However, I have some questions before the paper can be accepted for publication.

1. Can you please include more details about the model implementation in EES? What type of solver is used? Which numerical algorithms are used? How the coupled system of equations is solved?

2. A parametric study was also performed to investigate the effect of some parameters on the performance of the system. The usefulness of the paper will further increase if optimization is performed to obtain the optimal values of some of these parameters. 

3. A fixed cost of natural gas is used for the baseline. How will the economics of the system be impacted if the price of natural gas increases? The parametric study can also include the price of natural gas. 

Author Response

Please see attachments 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript is well revised. It is acceptable to publish.