Organic Rankine Cycle Optimization Performance Analysis Based on Super-Heater Pressure: Comparison of Working Fluids

The organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is widely accepted to produce electricity from low-grade thermal heat sources. In fact, it is a developed technology for waste-heat to electricity conversions. In this paper, an ORC made up of super-heater, turbine, regenerator, condenser, pump, economizer and evaporator is considered. An optimization model to obtain the maximum performance of such ORC, depending on the super-heater pressure, is proposed and assessed, in order to find possible new working fluids that are less pollutant with similar behavior to those traditionally used. The different super-heater pressures under analysis lie in between the condenser pressure and 80% of the critical pressure of each working fluid, taking 100 values uniformly distributed. The system and optimization algorithm have been simulated in Matlab with the CoolProp library. Results show that the twelve working fluids can be categorized into four main groups, depending on the saturation pressure at ambient conditions (condenser pressure), observing that the fluids belonging to Group 1, which corresponds with the lower condensing pressure (around 100 kPa), provide the highest thermal efficiency, with values around η=23−25%. Moreover, it is also seen that R123 can be a good candidate to substitute R141B and R11; R114 can replace R236EA and R245FA; and both R1234ZE and R1234YF have similar behavior to R134A.