Designing Optimized Organic Rankine Cycles Systems for Waste Heat-to-Power Conversion of Gas Turbine Flue Gases

Abstract

The focus of this work is to develop a flexible ORC design procedure that compares thermo-economic performances of simple and recuperative ORCs for both subcritical and supercritical cycles through a multi-objective optimization that relates the economic parameters to the network output for waste heat-to-power conversion of exhaust gases. Few researches have proposed rather simpler methods by modifications to the Jacob number (Ja) but these are insufficient to make technical and economic decisions on the subject matter as Ja is only appropriate for comparing performances of different working fluids at the same operating condition. Coupled with the barrier on the minimum temperature the exhaust gases from power plants may attain, the use of Ja as the only criteria is not sufficient for varying operating condition presented by Gas Turbine power plants. Hence, this review presents follow-through numerical methodology for designing adapted ORC for waste heat-to-power energy conversion.