5. Conclusions
Cost accounting is a procedure to calculate both fuel and product costs for components in power-producing systems. Thermoeconomics gives hints to calculate these costs from an exergy and economics perspective. A cogeneration system produces work and heat. Since work has more importance, determining the thermoeconomic cost of it in detail becomes obligatory. In this study, different methodologies were applied to an existing cogeneration system having 1000 kW of power production capacity. The first method is ECT, which researches the system in a very detailed way. This method views destructions as products and performs its calculations from this perspective. The second method, MOPSA, investigates destructions more clearly as entropy generation units and it determines the cost of the main product, work. On the other hand it gives distinct costs to destroyed exergies. Hence the cost of the work flow from the engine obtained by MOPSA is smaller than that obtained by ECT. The third method, Wonergy, deals with the cost of both work and heat produced by the system. In this manner, this method may be more reasonable for cogeneration systems and it produces the smallest thermoeconomic cost for work generated by the engine. The fourth and last method, SPECO, makes some assumptions from the fuel product rule perspective. It also considers destructions as products, like ECT; however, ECT gives both unit exergoeconomic cost, dealing with exergy, and unit thermoeconomic cost, dealing with exergetic cost, to each flow, and it analyzes the system more rigorously. Thus, SPECO calculations ended with the highest thermoeconomic cost for work flow from the biogas engine.