Solar powered organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is a promising technology and has the potential to provide clean electric energy. Extensive studies on the design of organic Rankine cycle systems have been conducted and reported in literature. However, very few studies have presented the influence of the climate zones on the performance of a solar powered ORC, especially for an integrated ORC and energy storage system. This paper presents an analysis to determine the performance of a solar powered ORC with electric energy storage (EES) to supply electricity to a building in different climate zones in the United States. The building type evaluated in this paper is the large office, and EnergyPlus was used to determine the energy consumption of the facility in each climate location. The ORC-EES operational strategy used in this investigation consists of the ORC charging the EES when solar irradiation is sufficient to generate power.  Then the EES provides power to the building when there is no solar energy available.  One of the purposes of this paper is to investigate the effect of the climate zone on the performance of the ORC-EES system. The ORC-EES is evaluated based on the potential to reduce the operational cost, the primary energy consumption, and the carbon dioxide emission.  Furthermore, the effect of the number of solar collectors and the EES size on the performance of the ORC-EES system is also studied.


Performance Analysis of a Solar Powered Organic Rankine Cycle With Energy Storage in Different Climate Zones in the United States

Division / Sponsor:
Advanced Energy Systems Division (AESD) & Solar Energy Division (SED)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/ES/ES2020/volume/83631

ES2020 - Virtual Conference 

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.