Performance analysis of organic Rankine cycles using different working fluids

Abstract

Low-grade heat from renewable or waste energy sources can be effectively recovered to generate power by an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) in which the working fluid has an important impact on its performance. The thermodynamic processes of ORCs using different types of organic fluids were analyzed in this paper. The relationships between the ORC?s performance parameters (including evaporation pressure, condensing pressure, outlet temperature of hot fluid, net power, thermal efficiency, exergy efficiency, total cycle irreversible loss, and total heat-recovery efficiency) and the critical temperatures of organic fluids were established based on the property of the hot fluid through the evaporator in a specific working condition, and then were verified at varied evaporation temperatures and inlet temperatures of the hot fluid. Here we find that the performance parameters vary monotonically with the critical temperatures of organic fluids. The values of the performance parameters of the ORC using wet fluids are distributed more dispersedly with the critical temperatures, compared with those of using dry/isentropic fluids. The inlet temperature of the hot fluid affects the relative distribution of the exergy efficiency, whereas the evaporation temperature only has an impact on the performance parameters using wet fluid.