Energy and resources efficiency and reduction of CO2 emission are becoming important criteria for the economical and ecological design in industries. For this purpose, exergy and thermoeconomics have been considered as suitable analysis tools at process and process component levels. Due to the complex thermodynamic analysis, these have rarely been used to optimize industrial processes. In addition, there is a strong need to develop an energy efficiency model to combine exergy and thermoeconomics with conventional energy analysis. To this aim, a new multidimensional analysis method, the exergy weighting method (EWM), is developed in this work to eliminate the limitations of each tool. The developed integrated method simplifies the application of the exergy concept in practice. EWM consists of three main phases. First, the critical parameters and losses are identified by comprehensive energy and exergy balance. Then the possible improvements are evaluated by the developed energy ratio (ER) and theoretical efficiency (TE) matrix. Subsequently, the exergy weighting factor (EWF) is determined as a holistic assessment index based on the integrated exergy, energy and thermoeconomics for comparing the improvement scenarios. For the flexible industrial application of the EWF, an evaluation interface tool is developed by MATLAB. The advantages of EWM for trade-off between integrated analysis tools are validated and discussed in various industrial manufacturing and energy generation systems.
