Reciprocating Expander for an Exhaust Heat Recovery Rankine Cycle for a Passenger Car Application

Yulia Glavatskaya, Pierre Podevin, Vincent Lemort, Osoko Shonda and Georges Descombes
Additional contact information
Yulia Glavatskaya: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, rue Saint-Martin, Paris 75003, France
Pierre Podevin: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, rue Saint-Martin, Paris 75003, France
Vincent Lemort: Laboratoir thermidynamique, Université de Liège, Campus du Sart Tilman-Bât. B49, Liège B-4000, Belgium
Osoko Shonda: Direction de recherche et technologies avancées, Renault, 1 avenue de Golf, Guyancourt 78288, France
Georges Descombes: Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, rue Saint-Martin, Paris 75003, France

Energies, 2012, vol. 5, issue 6, 1-15

Abstract: Nowadays, on average, two thirds of the fuel energy consumed by an engine is wasted through the exhaust gases and the cooling liquid. The recovery of this energy would enable a substantial reduction in fuel consumption. One solution is to integrate a heat recovery system based on a steam Rankine cycle. The key component in such a system is the expander, which has a strong impact on the system’s performance. A survey of different expander technologies leads us to select the reciprocating expander as the most promising one for an automotive application. This paper therefore proposes a steady-state semi-empirical model of the expander device developed under the Engineering Equation Solver (EES) environment. The ambient and mechanical losses as well as internal leakage were taken into account by the model. By exploiting the expander manufacturer’s data, all the parameters of the expander model were identified. The model computes the mass flow rate, the power output delivered and the exhaust enthalpy of the steam. The maximum deviation between predictions and measurement data is 4.7%. A performance study of the expander is carried out and shows that the isentropic efficiency is quite high and increases with the expander rotary speed. The mechanical efficiency depends on mechanical losses which are quite high, approximately 90%. The volumetric efficiency was also evaluated.

Keywords: Rankine cycle; heat recovery; heat exchanger; automotive engine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/5/6/1751/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/5/6/1751/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:5:y:2012:i:6:p:1751-1765:d:18137

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().