Volume 50

The Integration of Supercritical and Reheating Rankine Cycles in Advanced Thermal Energy Systems for Extreme Weather Adaptation Haonan Xie, Hui Sun, Dongdong Zhang, Shen Yuong Wong, Hui Hwang Goh

Abstract

Extreme high-temperature weather circumstances have also created notable opportunities for harnessing medium and low-temperature energy, particularly solar thermal energy. This study introduces an innovative binary Rankine cycle (BRC) system intending to optimise the available temperature range and enhance the energy conversion capacity. The proposed system comprises two subsystems: a reheating steam Rankine cycle (RSRC) system and a supercritical organic Rankine cycle (SORC) system. The numerical simulation demonstrates that the proposed BRC system exhibits great superiority in energy conversion compared to a single RSRC or SORC system. The proposed BRC system has a significant system efficiency of up to 25.4%, surpassing the individual RSRC (23.23%) or SORC (7.59%) system. This feature makes it highly promising for harnessing medium and low-temperature heat sources and its scale development can potentially mitigate harsh high-temperature weather conditions.

Keywords Reheating steam Rankine cycle, Supercritical organic Rankine cycle, Binary Rankine cycle, Solar thermal energy, Energy conversion efficiency