Performance of power plants with organic Rankine cycles under part-load and off-design conditions

Abstract

Low-grade heat can be converted to electricity using power plants based on conventional Rankine cycles but with an organic Rankine fluid. Design and construction of such plants have been known for a long time and they are now a commericial reality. Applications include industrial waste heat recovery systems, solar thermal systems, low-temperature geothermal power plants, stand-alone electricity generators like those used for cathodic protection of pipelines, etc. In the past, simulation studies of such systems have usually suffered from the lack of an efficient, reliable and fast algorithm to predict system performance under part-load and off-design conditions. In this study, an efficient algorithm is introduced to simulate ORC Plant performance and the part-load and off-design efficiencies of ORC Plants.