The Optimal Evaporation Temperature of Subcritical ORC Based on Second Law Efficiency for Waste Heat Recovery

The subcritical Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) with 28 working fluids for waste heat recovery is discussed in this paper. The effects of the temperature of the waste heat, the critical temperature of working fluids and the pinch temperature difference in the evaporator on the optimal evaporation temperature (OET) of the ORC have been investigated. The second law efficiency of the system is regarded as the objective function and the evaporation temperature is optimized by using the quadratic approximations method. The results show that the OET will appear for the temperature ranges investigated when the critical temperatures of working fluids are lower than the waste heat temperatures by 18 ± 5 K under the pinch temperature difference of 5 K in the evaporator. Additionally, the ORC always exhibits the OET when the pinch temperature difference in the evaporator is raised under the fixed waste heat temperature. The maximum second law efficiency will decrease with the increase of pinch temperature difference in the evaporator.