Small scale Organic Rankine Cycle testing for low grade heat recovery by using refrigerants as working fluids

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In the last two decades, big efforts have been addressed to investigate new technologies for emissions abatement and oil dependence reduction. Among these, technologies focused on heat recovery from thermal processes or using low grade heat as energy source (i.e. geothermal, solar), have been gained big attention by the scientific community. In this paper, a small Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) plant was tested under different operating conditions and by using refrigerants (R245fa) as working fluids. During these first operational tests the plant was operated only in regenerative layout (i.e. heat from hot fluid coming out of the expander, was partially recovered in the regenerator to preheat liquid fluid at the pumping outlet section). The performances of each of them (first law efficiency, exergy efficiency) were evaluated by imposing the expander inlet temperature and the electrical load at the generator. A simple mathematical model, was also used to predict the reference value of each of the parameter investigated.