Section: Application Domains

ORCs cycles

ORCs are Rankine cycles that use properly chosen low-boiling molecularly heavy organic compounds to drive the turbine in place of steam. This makes them suitable for the exploitation of low grade heat sources like biomass combustion, geothermal reservoirs and heat recovery from industrial processes. ORC turbines mainly use a single (less frequently, two) stage to expand the fluid. Up till present, no experimental data are available for flows of heavy fluids in the dense gas region. Experiments are difficult be cause of high temperature and pressure conditions, and fluid decomposition or inflammability in presence of air. This has motivated the use of numerical simulation as a preferential tool for dense gas flow analysis, but only a limited number of papers have been devoted to the computation of dense gas flows. With no experimental validation yet available for any of these configurations, care must be taken in the analysis of the computed flow fields because of their sensitivity to the thermodynamic model and to the numerical ingredients of the discretization scheme. Since no comparison with experimental data is possible, particular attention is devoted to code validation and model assessment. We created the plateform ORComp , for computing some global performance metrics, and we applied some UQ and numerical methods for taking into account the sun variability in the design of ORCs cycles, by using the platform RobUQ .