Various supercritical carbon dioxide cycle layouts study for molten carbonate fuel cell application

Abstract Various supercritical carbon dioxide (S–CO 2 ) cycles for a power conversion system of a Molten Carbonate Fuel Cell (MCFC) hybrid system are studied in this paper. Re-Compressing Brayton (RCB) cycle, Simple Recuperated Brayton (SRB) cycle and Simple Recuperated Transcritical (SRT) cycle layouts were selected as candidates for this study. In addition, a novel concept of S–CO 2 cycle which combines Brayton cycle and Rankine cycle is proposed and intensively studied with other S–CO 2 layouts. A parametric study is performed to optimize the total system to be compact and to achieve wider operating range. Performances of each S–CO 2 cycle are compared in terms of the thermal efficiency, net electricity of the MCFC hybrid system and approximate total volumes of each S–CO 2 cycle. As a result, performance and total physical size of S–CO 2 cycle can be better understood for MCFC S–CO 2 hybrid system and especially, newly suggested S–CO 2 cycle shows some success.