Exergy analysis of a 1.2 MW waste heat power generation project

Abstract According to systematic features, analysis method based on exergy balance is established. Basic indicators in the system, the subsystem, and facilities are put forward in this paper. By using this method to analyze the generation system of megawatt‐scale in one chemical enterprise, it is found that the objective exergy efficiency of the system is 35.67%, and exergy loss of organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is the highest. The thermal efficiency of the total system is 9.61%. For the condenser, the thermal efficiency is 91.18%, and the exergy efficiency is only 23.44%. The objective exergy efficiency of the evaporator is 74.04%. The influence coefficient of exergy loss of condenser is higher than that of pump and expander, but input exergy of the condenser is lower than that of the expander. It is revealed that ORC subsystem is the part which needs to be focused on, and the condenser is the most important component of ORC subsystem which should be optimized firstly.