Sensitivity analysis and thermoeconomic comparison of ORCs (organic Rankine cycles) for low temperature waste heat recovery

Yongqiang Feng, Yaning Zhang, Bingxi Li, Jinfu Yang and Yang Shi

Energy, 2015, vol. 82, issue C, 664-677

Abstract: The sensitivity analysis for low temperature ORCs (organic Rankine cycles), as well as the thermoeconomic comparison between the basic ORC and regenerative ORC using Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II), are conducted in this paper. The derivatives of five system parameters on system performance are used to evaluate the parametric sensitiveness. The exergy efficiency and the APR (heat exchanger area per unit net power output) are selected as the objective functions for multi-objective optimization using R123 under the low temperature heat source of 423 K. The Pareto frontier solution with bi-objective for maximizing exergy efficiency and minimizing APR is obtained and compared with the corresponding single-objective solutions. The results indicate that the prior consideration of improving thermal efficiency and exergy efficiency is to increase the evaporator outlet temperature. A fitting curve can be yielded from the Pareto frontier between the thermodynamic performance and economic factor. The optimum exergy efficiency and APR of the regenerative ORC obtained from the Pareto-optimal solution are 59.93% and 3.07 m2/kW, which are 8.10% higher and 15.89% lower than that of the basic ORC, respectively. The Pareto optimization compromises the thermodynamic performance and economic factor, therefore being more suitable for decision making.

Keywords: Organic Rankine cycles (ORCs); Thermoeconomic comparison; Heat exchanger area per unit net power output (APR); Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215000997
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:82:y:2015:i:c:p:664-677

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2015.01.075

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().