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Thermodynamic simulation and experimental validation of a cascaded two-stage organic Rankine cycle
(2015)
In combination with a bottoming cycle, operated with a pure fluid in transcritical mode, the usage of a zeotropic mixture as a working fluid appears to be exergetically favorable for power cycle efficiency in cascaded two-stage organic Rankine cycles (CORC). A CORC is set up and initially tested with cyclopentane and propane as working fluids in its high temperature and low temperature cycle, respectively. A thermal oil cycle serves as the heat source and is powered electrically with a maximum heat flow of 158 kW. The design of this experimental setup allows for a rapid replacement of individual components and for a wide range of conditions in terms of fluids and thermodynamic states. The components of all cycles and the measurement and control technology are described in detail. A testing procedure is presented, followed by a discussion of the measurement results, where it is shown that the intended concept of two cascaded organic Rankine cycles is operational and that the measured data are consistent.
A two-component system for control and monitoring of solar power towers with molten salt receivers is proposed. The control component consists of a model predictive control applica-tion (MPC) with a flexible objective function and on-line tunable weights, which runs on a In-dustrial PC and uses a reduced order dynamic model of the receiver’s thermal and flow dy-namics. The second component consists of a service-life monitoring unit, which estimates the service-life consumption of the absorber tubes depending on the current mode of operation based on thermal stresses and creep fatigue in the high temperature regime. The calculation of stresses is done based on a detailed finite element study, in which a digital twin of the re-ceiver was developed. By parallelising the model solver, the estimation of service-life con-sumption became capable of real-time operation. The system has been implemented at a test facility in Jülich, Germany, and awaits field experiments. In this paper, the modeling and archi-tecture are presented along simulation results, which were validated on a hardware-in-the-loop test bench. The MPC showed good disturbance rejection while respecting process variable constraints during the simulation studies.