Abstract The aim of any exergoeconomic accounting method is the calculation of the costs of the exergy flows interconnecting the plant components and exiting the total plant. To this end, cost balance equations for each component are always available. The number of these equations is in general lower than the number of exergy flows so that more equations are necessary to solve the cost calculations. The Specific-Cost Exergy-Costing Method (SPECOM) by Tsatsaronis, Lin 1990 suggests to formulate these auxiliary equations starting directly from the description of the process of adding/removing exergy and cost to/from the material streams. Cost balance equations can easily be represented in matrix form by means of an incidence matrix describing the input-output interconnections of each subsystem. A matrix representation of the SPECOM auxiliary equations is obtained here by analyzing how cost is added and removed during the process. The total system of equations for cost calculation is therefore available and implemented in a computer code which allows results to be easily obtained. An example of application is presented to show how the cost equations are formulated and represented in matrix form.
Lazzaretto et al. (Sun,) studied this question.