Organic Rankine Cycle coupling with a Parabolic Trough Solar Power Plant for cogeneration and industrial processes

Abstract

a b s t r a c tOver the last 25 years solar power plants based on parabolic trough concentrators have been developed for the commercial power industry. On the other hand, in recent years, a way to harness the solar energy is to cogenerate through Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technology coupled to an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) with potential applications to industrial processes. In this work we present a study of a small CSP plant coupled to an ORC with a novel configuration since useful energy is directly used to feed the power block and to charge the thermal storage. In order to analyze this novel configuration we consider a case study with cogeneration applied to textile industrial process at medium temperature. It turns out that this configuration reduces the size of the thermal storage disposal. The performance of the solar power plant was simulated with TRNSYS to emulate real operating conditions. We show the design, study and simulation results, including the production and efficiency curves for our load profile. Our results show that our system is a promising option for applications to medium temperature processes where electrical and heat generation is required.

A review of solar energy based heat and power generation systems

“…This interest comes from many reasons such as utilizing a local energy source which is freely available, reducing the dependency on fossil fuels, or even reducing the consumption of biomass through hybridization [101]. Most of the research has been conducted for residential scale consumers, but several other plant scales have also been analysed such as schools [39], hospitals [53], multi-unit dwellings [74], industrial processes [73,104,121], hotels [100,123], district energy supply [92][93][94]101], and specific end-uses such as swimming pool heating [49]. Since evaluating the possibilities for fully renewable solar energy based CHP plants is a recent field of research, the main focus until now has been on evaluating suitable plant configurations for different locations around the world.…”

“…The required heat exchanger areas were also smaller when using the nanofluid. Borunda et al [73] analysed an ORC unit coupled with a parabolic trough solar field for a textile industrial process in Almeria, Spain. The results indicated that the analysed plant is a promising option for medium temperature applications where both heat and electricity are required as outputs.…”

Line-focusing concentrating solar collector-based power plants: a review

“…Organic Rankine cycle-based power block manufacturers have been present in the market since the beginning of 1980s and produce ORC-based power blocks for a wide range of power generation and temperature ranges (Qiu et al 2011;Vélez et al 2012 (Borunda et al 2016) and solar-geothermal hybrid plant (Astolfi et al 2011) have also been proposed as a promising option. Compared to the steam Rankine cycle, an organic Rankine cycle, with dry working fluids, offers better design and part-load efficiencies in small-medium scale plants, with heat sources temperatures up to 400°C (Hung et al 1997;Lecompte et al 2015).…”

Experimental investigation of concentrated solar air-heater with internal multiple-fin array

“…The collectors themselves are used in electricity production installations and for industrial processes [8], to support the processes of desalination [9], in solar thermochemical hydrogen production [10], or in simple solar cookers [11].…”