Abstract
Abstract The majority of the energy in the fuel burned in the internal combustion engines is lost in the form of waste heat. To address this issue, waste heat recovery technology has been proposed to increase the overall efficiency of engine. This paper investigates a heat driven cooling system based on a supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) power cycle integrated with a transcritical CO2 (T-CO2) refrigeration cycle, aiming to provide an alternative to the absorption cooling system. The combined system is proposed to produce cooling for food preservation on a refrigerated truck by waste heat recovery of engine. In this system, the S-CO2 absorbs heat from the exhaust gas and the generated power in the expander is used to drive the compressors in both S-CO2 power cycle and T-CO2 refrigeration cycle. Unlike the bulky absorption cooling system, both power plant and vapour compression refrigerator can be scaled down to a few kilo Watts, opening the possibility for developing small-scale waste heat driven cooling system that can be widely applied for waste heat recovery from IC engines of truck, ship and train. A new layout sharing a common cooler is also studied. The results suggest that the concept of S-CO2/T-CO2 combined cycle sharing a common cooler has comparable performance and it is thermodynamically feasible. The heat contained in exhaust gas is sufficient for the S-CO2/T-CO2 combined system to provide enough cooling for refrigerated truck cabinet whose surface area is more than 105 m2.
Highlights
Refrigerated truck is necessary for maintaining the quality and prolonging the shelf-life of fresh, frozen and perishable products during transportation
The operation pressure of S-CO2 power cycle influences the operation of the transcritical CO2 (T-CO2) refrigeration cycle since the power consumed by the compressor-2 in T-CO2 is provided by the expander in S-CO2
This paper proposes a refrigeration system that essentially integrates a S-CO2 power cycle and a T-CO2 refrigeration combined cycle by waste heat recovery of engine
Summary
Refrigerated truck is necessary for maintaining the quality and prolonging the shelf-life of fresh, frozen and perishable products during transportation. Liang et al (2013, 2014, 2018) conducted several investigations of waste heat recovery (WHR) of marine engine by integrating absorption refrigeration cycle with steam Rankine cycle. Wang’s research group (Gao et al 2016, Zhu et al 2016, Gao et al 2019) were devoted to a series of research on solid sorption freezing cycle for refrigerated trucks Both absorption and adsorption cooling systems have their own characteristics and advantage, and both can be powered by waste heat energy. The ORCVCC is attractive providing cooling by waste heat recovery, there are still some problems for its practical applications, including the decomposition issue of the organic working fluid in ORC and the difficulty in finding suitable environmentally friendly refrigerants in VCC (Liang et al, 2018). A comprehensive energy and exergy analysis evaluation was carried out to demonstrate the potential of the proposed S-CO2/T-CO2 refrigeration system on refrigerated trucks
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