Performance assessment of a standard radial turbine as turbo expander for an adapted solar concentration ORC

Abstract

Organic Rankine cycles are one of the available solutions for converting low grade heat source into electrical power. However the development of plants tends to be very expansive due to the specific design of the expander. Usually, the input parameters for designing an ORC plant are the temperature and power of the heat and cold sources. They lead to the selection of a working fluid, pressures and temperatures. The expander is then designed based on the required operating parameters. Using standard turbine easily available on the market and with well known performances would allow to reduce the development and manufacturing cost. However, the ORC would have to be adapted to make the expander work in its best conditions. For a solar concentrated heat source, the temperature and power can be adapted by adjusting the concentration factor and the total area of the collector. In this paper, a given gas turbine is considered to be used as the expander of the ORC. Knowing the turbine's performances with air, the optimal operating parameters (pressure, temperature, flow rate and rotational speed) of the ORC with different fluids are sought based on similitude rules. The adaptation aims to maintain the same density evolution, inlet speed triangle and inlet Mach number with the working fluid as with air. The performance maps of the turbine are then computed with CFD simulations and showed a maximum isentropic efficiency close to the one with air, about 78%.