Supercritical Fluid Parameters in Organic Rankine Cycle Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, the use of Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) in decentralised applications is linked with the fact that this process allows to use low temperature heat sources and offers an advantageous efficiency in small-scale applications. Many state of the art applications like geothermal and biomass fired power plants as well as new applications like solar desalination with reverse osmosis, waste heat recovery from biogas digestion plants or micro-Combined Heat and Power (micro-CHP) systems can successfully use the ORC process. The investigation of supercritical parameters in ORC applications seems to bring promising results in decentralised energy production. This paper presents the results from the simulation of the ORC process in normal and supercritical fluid parameters and discusses the efficiency variation in various applications.