Performance analysis of organic Rankine cycles using multi-component working fluids tailored for solar applications

Among the different renewable sources of energy, solar power could play a primary role in the development of a more sustainable electricity generation system. While large scale concentrated solar power plants based on the steam Rankine cycle have already been proved to be cost effective, research is still under progress for small scale low temperature solar-driven power plants. The steam Rankine cycle is suitable for high temperature applications, but its efficiency drastically decreases as the heat source temperature drops. In these cases a much more promising configuration is the organic Rankine cycle. The purpose of this paper is to optimize a low temperature organic Rankine cycle tailored for solar applications. The objective of the optimization is the maximization of the solar to electrical efficiency and the optimization parameters are the working fluid and the turbine inlet temperature and pressure. Both pure fluids and binary mixtures are considered as possible working fluids and thus one of the primary aims of the study is to evaluate whether the use of multi-component working fluids might lead to increased solar to electrical efficiencies. The considered configuration includes a solar field made of parabolic trough collectors and a recuperative organic Rankine cycle. Pressurized water is selected as heat transfer fluid and its maximum temperature is fixed to 150°C. The target power output for the plant is 100 kWel. A part load analysis is carried out in order to define the most suitable control strategy and both the overall annual production and the average solar to electrical efficiency are estimated with an annual simulation. The results suggest that the introduction of binary working fluids enables to increase the solar system performance both in design and part-load operation.