Comparative study of alternative ORC-based combined power systems to exploit high temperature waste heat

In this paper, various combined power systems which regard organic Rankine cycle (ORC) as bottoming cycle to recover engine’s high temperature exhaust heat are proposed. The topping recovery cycle includes steam Rankine cycle (RC), Brayton cycle (BC) and thermoelectric generator (TEG). Comprehensive evaluations are conducted under five typical engine conditions, ranging from high load to low load, and system performance is assessed in terms of many thermodynamic indexes, such as net output power, thermal efficiency, recovery efficiency and exergy efficiency. Besides that, the irreversibility of each component is also discussed in detail. R123, R245fa and R600a for ORC system are considered to analyze the influence of working fluids. Considering the system techno-economy, the turbine size parameter (SP) and heat transfer capacity (UA) are chosen as key indicators. The results show that compared with the other two investigated approaches, dual-loop ORC (DORC) possesses the highest energy exploitation capacity under the whole operating region, with a 5.57% increase of fuel economy under the rated condition, but its values of SP and UA are large as well. TEG–ORC becomes appealing while under the relatively low load.