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Energy, Innovation

Organic Rankine Cycle

12.13.06 | 5 Comments

The Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is a fancy name for a binary system taking heat from a source and transferring it to a working liquid in a closed system to be vaporized and pressurized, typically turn a turbine, then condense back to liquid form before flowing through the heat exchanger again to repeat the cycle. The diagram below breaks out the typical components of an ORC system.



These systems can vary in size from a few hundred kilowatts clear up to hundreds of megawatts. A picture of a 200Kw system is displayed below.



These ORC systems have several key benefits over traditional steam turbines including lower operating temperature (down to 75C,) less wear and tear on turbines (clean single fluid environment,) and no requirement to expose heat source to the environment (no emission power generation is possible using these units in a closed geothermal system for instance.) The major disadvantage to this approach is that energy is lost during the heat transfer process relative to direct use systems.


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