Analysis of Advanced Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Power Cycles With a Bottoming Cycle for Concentrating Solar Power Applications

A number of studies have been performed to assess the potential of using supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO₂) in closed-loop Brayton cycles for power generation. Different configurations have been examined among which recompression and partial cooling configurations have been found very promising, especially for concentrating solar power (CSP) applications. It has been demonstrated that the S-CO₂ Brayton cycle using these configurations is capable of achieving more than 50% efficiency at operating conditions that could be achieved in central receiver tower type CSP systems. Although this efficiency is high, it might be further improved by considering an appropriate bottoming cycle utilizing waste heat from the top S-CO₂ Brayton cycle. The organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is one alternative proposed for this purpose, however, its performance is substantially affected by the selection of the working fluid. In this paper, a simple S-CO₂ Brayton cycle, a recompression S-CO₂ Brayton cycle, and a partial cooling S-CO₂ Brayton cycle are first simulated and compared with the available data in the literature. Then, an ORC is added to each configuration for utilizing the waste heat. Different working fluids are examined for the bottoming cycles and the operating conditions are optimized. The combined cycle efficiencies and turbine expansion ratios are compared to find the appropriate working fluids for each configuration. It is also shown that combined recompression-ORC cycle achieves higher efficiency compared with other configurations.