Performance of air-cooled organic Rankine cycle plants using temperature distributions from arid parts of South Australia

Abstract

Air-cooling is necessary for geothermal plays in dry areas and ambient air temperature significantly affects the power output of air-cooled thermal power plants. Hence, a method for determining the effect of ambient air temperature on subcritical and supercritical, air-cooled binary Rankine cycles using moderate temperature geothermal fluid and various working fluids is presented. Part of this method, includes a method for maximizing working fluid flow from a supercritical heat exchanger. In the example presented isobutane is used as the working fluid, while the geothermal fluid temperature and flowrate are set at 150°C and 126kg/s. Results of this analysis show that for every 14°C increase in ambient air temperature, above the ambient temperature used for design purposes, there is ~20% loss in brine efficiency; while conversely, there is no gain in brine efficiency for any drop in ambient air temperature below the ambient air temperature used for design purposes. Using the ambient air temperature distribution from Leigh Creek, Australia, this analysis shows that an optimally designed plant produces 6% more energy annually than a plant designed using the mean ambient temperature.