Thermodynamic and economic analysis of organic Rankine cycle combined with flash cycle and ejector

Jintao Niu, Jiansheng Wang and Xueling Liu

Energy, 2023, vol. 282, issue C

Abstract: Increasing the net output power of the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) can increase the possibility of developing low-medium temperature heat sources. It is equally important to effectively control the system's economy. So, subcritical double-pressure ORC combined with flash cycle and ejector (S-EFDPORC) and transcritical ORC combined with flash cycle and ejector (T-EFDPORC) are proposed in present work. The thermodynamic and economic analyses on five proposed systems within the heat source temperature range of 100 °C–200 °C are conducted. The net output power and levelized energy cost (LEC) are treated as optimization objectives in thermodynamic and economic performance comparisons, respectively. The non-dominated sorting and three multi-objective optimization methods (LINMAP, TOPSIS, and Shannon Entropy) are used to perform the multi-objective optimization. The results show that S-EFDPORC and T-EFDPORC can both effectively improve the net output power compared with subcritical double-pressure ORC (S-DPORC) and transcritical double-pressure ORC (T-DPORC), while subcritical ORC combined with flash cycle and ejector (S-EFORC) can only improve the net output power within a certain temperature range. When the optimization objective is the net output power, compared with S-DPORC and T-DPORC, the growth rate of net output power in S-EFORC is more than 20% when the temperature is below 160 °C. When the temperature of the heat source is below 160 °C or above 180 °C, the growth rates of net output power of S-EFDPORC and T-EFDPORC increase more than 25%. When LEC is treated as optimization objective, compared with S-DPORC and T-DPORC, S-EFORC reduces LEC by more than 10%. S-EFDPORC and T-EFDPORC increase the LEC of the system, and the maximum growth rates of LEC are 30% and 60% respectively, resulting in worse economic performance. With three multi-objective optimization methods, both S-EFDPORC and T-EFDPORC can increase net output power, but their economy will deteriorate at most heat source temperatures. Although S-EFORC increase the net output power when the heat source temperature is below than 177 °C, LEC reduces throughout the heat source temperature range.

Keywords: Organic Rankine Cycle; Flash cycle; Ejector; Net output power; Levelized energy cost; Multi-objective optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:282:y:2023:i:c:s0360544223023769

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2023.128982

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