Natural refrigerants for low temperature power cycles

• Working fluid selection determines various characteristics of low temperature Rankine cycles. Among other factors, the selected working fluid affects thermal performance, apparatus size and economic feasibility of the cycle. Beyond only affecting characteristics of the system, unrealistic preconditions for the working fluid of the system may force the designers in using environmentally harmful mixtures and force the outcome beyond boundaries of environmental regulations. There has been numerous research and scrutiny on various working fluids, but due to the unstructured and unorganized orientation of previous studies, there is no comprehensive insight on relationship of different characteristics of the working fluid and overall performance of the system. This work intends to develop a numerical evaluation approach, using a modified stochastic optimization algorithm as a search engine. The paper further explores and questions the existing criteria for optimization of working fluids in Rankine cycle. Rather than just finding the optimum fluids for different cases, this study aims to investigate the behavior of different fluids around optimum points and see the bigger picture to find trends in different fluid behaviors. Analysis of results show two main behaviors among the fluids in subcritical cycles. In the first type behavior, the optimum points for output work, thermal efficiency and exergy efficiency lie very close to each other, while in second type, these optimum points are not close. There is a transition from first type behavior to second type for a ratio of critical temperature around 0.9 of heat source inlet temperature. These results also show the importance of key performance parameter determination.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Energiteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Energy Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Cycle analysis

Low temperature

Power cycle

Rankine cycle

Waste heat recovery

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)