BLOG | 23 FEBRUARY 2022
UNDERSTANDING sCO2 CYCLE EFFICIENCY THROUGH SIMULATION
DIFFERENCES IN THE PERFORMANCE OF THE SCO2 POWER CYCLE COMPARED TO COMMON POWER CYCLES
As increased energy efficiency becomes more critical in all forms of power generation, new cycles are being considered by many industries to replace the traditional Rankine cycle. Supercritical carbon dioxide is currently being considered as a potential successor due to a wide range of advantages, such as a reduced physical footprint, the ability to respond faster to load changes and increased thermal efficiency. Of all these advantages, the most difficult point to understand in my opinion is the increased thermal efficiency. In this post I will highlight the key differences in the performance of the sCO2 power cycle compared to common power cycles to aid in understanding the contributing factors to an improved thermal efficiency of the sCO2 power cycle.
I will skip over an extensive definition of a supercritical fluid and simply mention that it behaves like a gas in the sense that it fills a space with no liquid level while having a similar density to that of a liquid.
"The only other important characteristic about sCO2 is that the specific heat is about 5 times higher near the critical point when compared to the conditions at a higher temperature and entropy."
The high specific heat near the critical point is the most significant factor for the increased thermal efficiency of the cycle and will be further explained in this post where we look at the compressor work for common power cycles.
For this post I will be comparing sCO2 with standard air in the same cycle configuration to understand the advantages of using CO2 as the working fluid. I will also compare these results to a typical Helium Brayton cycle commonly used in nuclear power generation applications. The sCO2 cycle I have simulated is the recompression Brayton cycle (RCBC), this configuration is considered the ideal cycle for sCO2 and has a good balance of complexity and efficiency.
THE FIGURE BELOW SHOWS THE SCO2 RCBC MODEL BUILT IN FLOWNEX:
The cycle is configured for a turbine inlet temperature of 700°C and a cooler outlet temperature of 35°C. The maximum and minimum pressures are set to 20MPa and 7.5MPa respectively.
For direct comparison I built an identical cycle using air as the working fluid. Lastly, I built a Helium Brayton cycle with a recuperator and intercooler. This is a typical cycle configuration for Helium and uses the same number of compressors and heat exchangers as the RCBC cycle.
THE FIGURE BELOW SHOWS THE HELIUM BRAYTON CYCLE MODEL BUILT IN FLOWNEX:
The turbine inlet temperature and cooler exit temperature for the Helium Brayton cycle were both set to the same values as those used in the sCO2 and air RCBC cycles. The maximum and minimum pressures were modified to 8MPa and 4.21MPa respectively, to be more representative of a typical Helium power cycle.
For all the cycles considered I made use of the optimiser tool available in Flownex to maximise the cycle efficiency using the unconstrained parameters in the cycles. For the RCBC cycles I varied the bypass flowrate fraction and found the optimal values for maximum cycle efficiency to be 26.9% for sCO2 and 3.9% for air. For the Helium cycle I varied the pressure at which the intercooler operates and found the optimal value to be 5.63MPa. Lastly, I used the designer to vary the mass flowrate for each cycle to achieve a heat input of 10MW. With the easy-to-use user interface of Flownex the 3 models were not only built but also optimised in under an hour.
THE GRAPH BELOW SHOWS THE EFFICIENCY FOR EACH OF THE 3 CYCLES:
As hinted at in the introduction, it can be clearly seen that the efficiency of the sCO2 RCBC cycle is higher than the other cycles. To understand this a bit better, let’s look more closely at the differences in performance between the 3 cycles. Firstly, we can look at the total compressor power required by each cycle.
The first thing to note is the large difference in the compression power required by the sCO2 RCBC cycle and air RCBC cycle. Since the pressures in the 2 models are the same, the difference must be down to the difference in fluid properties. As I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, the specific heat for CO2 near the critical point is very high (±6.0 kJ/kg.K) and for the sCO2 RCBC cycle, this point coincides with inlet of the compressor. For comparison, the specific heat of air at the same point in the air RCBC cycle is ±1.1 kJ/kg.K. This difference in specific heat along with the increased density of CO2 (273 kg/m3 for CO2 compared to 85 kg/m3 for air) results in a large decrease in the amount of power required to compress the CO2. When looking at the Helium cycle, despite the pressure ratio being 1.9 while the pressure ratio for the sCO2 cycle is 2.66, the compression power is still significantly less for sCO2.
This large difference in compression power required can be considered the driving factor behind the high efficiency of the sCO2 RCBC cycle, provided that the turbine power output is not significantly less for this cycle. To investigate this, I’ve graphed the turbine power for each of the 3 cycles as well as the ratio of compressor power to turbine power below:
The graphs above prove that despite the lower turbine power output, the compression power required for the sCO2 RCBC cycle is significantly less than that for air or Helium when accounting for the decreased turbine power of sCO2.
To summarise, through simulation we have been able to learn that the efficiency gains of sCO2 are due to the reduced work required to compress the fluid. This reduced work can be attributed to the high specific heat and density of CO2 at the compressor inlet.
There are many more exciting problems that need to be resolved before sCO2 power generation cycles become commercialised such as the transient operation of these cycles. If you’re interested in solving some of these more challenging problems using Flownex please feel free to take a look at our sCO2 industry page and request a demo. My colleagues and I are excited to meet you and explain all the functionality of our software that makes it an ideal tool for sCO2 cycle design.
VINCENT BRITZ
Vincent is a Thermofluids Solver Developer at Flownex who specialises in Gas Turbines and Power Cycle Analysis.
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