Performance of a Small-scale Organic Rankine Cycle System Using a Regenerative Flow turbine: a Simulation Analysis

orc2019 Tracking Number 155

Organic Rankine Cycles (ORCs) have an interesting potential in small-scale power production using low temperature heat sources. Despite their unique applications in power production from low-temperature heat sources, the widespread use of small-scale ORC systems is still challenging especially due to high primary cost resulting in long-term payback periods. The reason goes back to a number of inherent technical limitations especially related to the available expander machines, which are usually accounted for a significant amount of the total investment cost of such systems. In this paper, a Regenerative Flow Turbine (RFT) adopted in a small-scale ORC prototype is investigated by means of the modeling study. The performance curves of the considered turbine have been taken from a previous CFD analysis carried out by the authors and used in the current study to evaluate the performance of the system with varying operating conditions. Hence, performance of the ORC system has been studied in terms of efficiency and net power. The system shows an overall performance that is comparable to that of conventional systems, however the main advantage of adopting the RFT is indeed low investment cost and high reliability, which are important factors in design of the such small-scale power systems.