Integrated thermo-economic design of ORC process, working fluid and equipment using PC-SAFT

Abstract Organic Rankine Cycles (ORCs) generate electrical power from low-temperature heat. To exploit the full potential of a heat source, the cycle has to be tailored to the specific application. In this work, we present an approach for the integrated thermo-economic design of ORC process, working fluid and equipment based on a single thermodynamic model. The approach is based on the Continuous-Molecular Targeting–Computer-aided Molecular Design (CoMT-CAMD) approach. Herein, the Perturbed-Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory (PC-SAFT) equation of state is used as a thermodynamic model. So far, CoMT-CAMD was limited to equilibrium thermodynamics. However, novel PC-SAFT-based models for transport properties using entropy scaling enable the integration of rigorous equipment design into the CoMT-CAMD approach. By solving the resulting mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem, the presented approach allows the integrated design of economically optimal ORCs.

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