Abstract
Addressing the environmental and economic concerns related to energy use in buildings has prompted a global emphasis on energy sustainability by reducing dependence on fossil fuels and promoting cleaner alternatives. One such alternative for utilizing renewable sources is the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system. In this paper, an integrated solar-powered organic Rankine cycle with battery energy storage (ORC-BES) system is proposed, and its performance is optimized with the objectives of reducing operational cost, capital cost, and carbon dioxide emission (CDE) for different building types and locations. The proposed system, which includes organic Rankine cycle, flat plate solar thermal collector (FPC), and battery energy storage, is configured in such a manner that the solar-powered ORC generates electricity for the building during daytime while the BES stores excess electricity for later use. A multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) is adopted to determine the optimal battery size and solar thermal collector size for the proposed ORC-BES system. Several different dry organic fluids are selected to evaluate the performance of the system. The building types under investigation in this paper include hospitals and large offices, which are the commercial reference building models developed by the Department of Energy (DOE). Several locations separated in different climate zones in the United States, including California, New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and Georgia are chosen as case studies to present the optimization results. Results show that the proposed optimization method can be effectively applied to the ORC-BES system to obtain an optimal design and operation, which reaches a trade-off between the economic, energy, and environmental performance of different buildings and locations.
