Abstract
A thermodynamic analysis and optimization of a newly conceived combined power cycle were conducted in this paper for the purpose of improving overall thermal efficiency of power cycles by attempting to minimize thermodynamic irreversibilities and waste heat as a consequence of the Second Law. The power cycle concept comprises a topping advanced recompression supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) Brayton cycle and a bottoming transcritical carbon dioxide (tCO2) Rankine cycle. The bottoming cycle configurations included a simple tCO2 Rankine cycle and a split tCO2 Rankine cycle. The topping sCO2 recompression Brayton cycle used a combustion chamber as a heat source, and waste heat from a topping cycle was recovered by the tCO2 Rankine cycle due to an added high efficiency recuperator for generating electricity. The combined cycle configurations were thermodynamically modeled and optimized using an Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software. Simple bottoming tCO2 Rankine cycle cannot fully recover the waste heat due to the high exhaust temperature from the top cycle, and therefore an advance split tCO2 Rankine cycle was employed in order to recover most of the waste heat. Results show that the highest thermal efficiency was obtained with recompression sCO2 Brayton cycle split flow tCO2 Rankine cycle. Also, the results show that the combined CO2 cycles is a promising technology compared to conventional cycles.