Effects of Internal Heat Exchanger on Performance of Organic Rankine Cycles

Organic Rankine cycles (ORC) can be used to produce power from heat at different temperature levels available as geothermal heat, as biogenic heat from biomass, as solar or as waste heat. In ORC working fluids with relatively low critical temperatures and pressures can be compressed directly to their supercritical pressures and heated before expansion so as to obtain a better thermal match with their heat sources. In this work thermal performance of ORC with and without an internal heat exchanger is comparatively investigated in the range of subcritical and transcritical cycles. R134a is considered as working fluid and special attention is paid to the effect of turbine inlet pressure on the characteristics of the system. Results show that operation with supercritical cycles can provide better performance than subcritical cycles and the internal heat exchanger can improve the thermal efficiency when the temperature of heat source becomes higher.