Analysis of an integrated solar combined cycle with steam and organic Rankine cycles as bottoming cycles

Abstract

Integrated Solar Combined Cycles (ISCC) are currently used in countries with high incident solar radiation in order to increase the net output power and decrease the specific fuel consumption. The present work introduces a modified ISCC with two bottoming cycles. The first bottoming cycle is a steam Rankine cycle while the second one is an Organic Rankine Cycle ORC. Multistage compression with intercooling was considered for the gas turbine unit. The ORC was used in order to intercool the compressed air and produce a net power from the received thermal energy. The proposed cycle performance was studied and optimized. Fifteen working fluids were investigated for use with the ORC. Results showed that R1234ze(z) introduces a good compromise between thermodynamics, economic, safety and environmental considerations. The cycle with R1234ze(z) as a working fluid showed an increase of the output power by 19.5% with solar contribution and 23.1% without solar contribution. The increase of the net output power with the application of the proposed cycle is higher than the power produced from a 50MW solar field. Moreover, the proposed cycle is less affected by variations of the ambient temperature.