A small-scale pumpless Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) system driven by the low temperature heat source is established to investigate the overall performance. Hot water temperature from 75 o C to 95 o C is adopted for performance analysis whereas the environmental temperature is about 25 o C. Refrigerant R245fa is selected as working fluid, and scroll expander is employed for power generation. One worth noting fact is that pumpless ORC system shows great potential for low temperature heat recovery. Experimental results indicate that the maximum power output is 232 W, which is obtained at 95 o C hot water inlet temperature. Correspondingly, the average power output is 204 W which is lasted for 6.6 min, revealing the high stability for power generation. For different hot water inlet temperature, the highest energy and exergy efficiency of the system are 2.4% and 13.7%. Besides, performance of novel pumpless ORC system is compared with that of our previous prototype. It shows a remarkable improvement in terms of power output, energy efficiency and exergy efficiency. Power generation process is able to keep constant for 95% of the cycle time. As a result, pumpless ORC may become an alternative solution to low grade heat utilization when compared with conventional small-scale ORC.
Summary
This paper focuses on the novelty pumpless organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and its choice of working fluids. Based on the selection criteria, the refrigerant of R1233zd(E) is firstly chosen and investigated in the pumpless ORC system. In the system, the feed pump is removed, and the refrigerant flows back and forth between two heat exchangers, which act as the evaporator or condenser, respectively. The impacts of the heating water temperature and loads on the system performance are studied to find out the best operating conditions. The low‐grade heat source is simulated by an electric boiler. The temperature of the heat resource ranges from 80°C to 100°C with the interval of 5°C. The temperature of the cooling water inlet is 10°C and is kept constant. The largest average power output is 127 W under the condition of 100°C heating water with nine loads. Because the cycle efficiency with heating steam temperature of 100°C cannot be determined, the highest energy and exergy efficiencies are 3.5% and 17.1%, respectively, for heating water of 95°C with seven loads. The experimental results show that the energy and exergy efficiencies increase with the increase of the heating temperature. The power and current outputs increase when the loads increase under the condition of the constant heating water temperature, whereas the voltage output decreases meanwhile. The generating time increases when the loads increase. This phenomenon is mainly caused by the increasing evaporating pressure and decreasing condensing pressure when the loads increases.
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