Experimental and numerical analyses of a 5 kWe oil-free open-drive scroll expander for small-scale organic Rankine cycle (ORC) applications

Abstract Organic Rankine cycles (ORCs) are thermodynamic power cycles designed to generate work from a wide range of heat source conditions. In particular, low-grade waste heat recovery (WHR) ( ° C) can be effectively exploited with such systems. The efficiency of an ORC is highly dependent on its expander performance. In the low power output range ( ° C and 110 ° C, were investigated. The scroll expander achieved a maximum overall isentropic efficiency of 0.58 for the temperature source of 110 ° C, for the imposed specific volume ratio of 6.12 at rotational speed of 1600 rpm. For the same heat source, the maximum expander power output was 3.75 kW for an imposed specific volume ratio of 6.55 and rotational speed of 2500 rpm. Besides the experimental work, the performance of the expander was characterized by means of a semi-empirical model to break-down the different loss terms. A well known model available in the literature was extended to account for the major frictional losses in a scroll machine, i.e. bearings, tip-seals and other sources of friction. Additionally, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling approach was also proposed to achieve higher accuracy in mapping expander performance for use in system simulation. The experimental data and model source codes are provided as supplementary materials .

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