Energy
Energy
5 years ago

Performance analysis and parametric optimization of supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) cycle with bottoming Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC)

Supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) cycle is proven to be one promising alternative to provide high efficiency and has been developed for a wide range of energy conversion applications. Thermal efficiency of the S-CO2 cycle can be further improved by incorporating an appropriate bottoming cycle utilizing the residual heat. In this paper, an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is added to the S-CO2 cycle for heat recovery. Different recuperative ratios of the topping S-CO2 cycle are considered and the influence of heat source initial temperature and total heat load on the bottoming ORC is evaluated. Two configurations of the S-CO2-ORC combined cycle system are presented, one without a pre-cooler and the other still with a pre-cooler, corresponding to total and partial residual heat recovery respectively. Though the entire residual heat recovery by the bottoming cycle could definitely increase the system thermal efficiency, the low ORC evaporation temperature and mediocre ORC performance leads to a limited improvement. While in the combined cycle system with a pre-cooler, higher ORC evaporation temperature could be attained and it has a remarkable effect on the ORC performance, even though part of the topping cycle residual heat is discharged to the ambient. The simulation results reveal that the S-CO2-ORC combined cycle system performance could be significantly improved through this parametric optimization. The recompression S-CO2 cycle with bottoming ORC is then analyzed and thermal performance is improved based on the previous optimization results. The bottoming ORC could effectively recover the residual heat of the topping S-CO2 cycle and increase the system thermal efficiency, thus it can be considered and applied in similar practical cases.

Publisher URL: www.sciencedirect.com/science

DOI: S0360544217318418

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.