Efficiencies of power flash cycles

Ngoc Anh Lai and Johann Fischer

Energy, 2012, vol. 44, issue 1, 1017-1027

Abstract: Power flash cycles (PFC) are a generalization of trilateral cycles (TLC) in which the compressed liquid is heated up to its boiling point and then performs a flash expansion during which it delivers power. The end point of the expansion may be in the wet vapour region (TLC) or in the dry vapour region. Here model results are presented for PFC-systems including the heat transfer to and from the cycles with aromates, siloxanes, and alkanes as working fluids. Optimization criterion is the exergy efficiency for power production at different pairs of heat carrier and cooling agent inlet temperatures ranging from (350 °C, 62 °C) to (150 °C, 15 °C). Comparisons with TLC for water, organic Rankine cycles (ORC) and water Clausius-Rankine cycles are made. General findings are that PFC has higher power production efficiencies than ORC but larger volume flows at the expander outlet. Moreover, TLC with water have in all cases the highest or nearly highest power production efficiencies. The disadvantage of water are the large outlet volume flows at low temperatures. For these cases alkanes like cyclopentane are to be preferred in PFC which can have significantly smaller outlet volume flows and rather high power production efficiencies.

Keywords: Heat to power conversion; Trilateral cycle; Organic Rankine cycle; Organic working fluids; Process optimization; Exergy analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544212003441
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:44:y:2012:i:1:p:1017-1027

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2012.04.046

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 ().