Technical and economic analysis of organic flash regenerative cycles (OFRCs) for low temperature waste heat recovery

Organic Flash Cycles (OFCs) can improve the overall efficiency of waste heat recovery or geothermal systems due to a better match of the hot and cold heat transfer curves. However, the lower mean temperature difference between the heat transfer curves implies larger exchanger areas and therefore higher heat exchanger costs. In order to reduce the exchanger size, a new cycle configuration is introduced in this paper, consisting in a new type of organic flash regenerative cycle (OFRC) for heat source temperatures in the range 80–170 °C. The regeneration allows to recover part of the enthalpy of the liquid phase from the flash evaporator increasing the temperature of the liquid at the exchanger inlet, thus reducing the exchanger size. The thermodynamic performance of OFRCs are practically the same as of the OFC, but the unit cost of the system per kW installed power can be 20% lower. A variety of working fluids was tested and results have shown that long molecular chain alkanes provide the best thermodynamic efficiency, but those fluids have the main drawback of a low vapor density, resulting in very large expansion devices and condensers. R601a is the working fluid featuring the best tradeoff between thermodynamic efficiency and components size in the heat source temperature range between 80 °C and 170 °C. The comparison of the OFRC with conventional ORCs has shown the thermodynamic superiority of the OFRC with every tested fluid. Finally the cost analysis has highlighted that OFRCs specific cost has the same magnitude as ORCs for mini and micro scale plants.