Preliminary Design of Organic Rankine Cycle using Solar Thermal in Hungary

Renewable energy sources have grown in popularity in a variety of applications over the last century, particularly in solar power generation. Exploiting solar energy in low-medium temperature systems via the organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is a prospective idea for producing clean energy in remote areas at a low cost. The amount of solar energy available in Hungary is sufficient to power the ORC system. In this study, a parabolic through collector (PTC) solar collector is used to convert solar thermal energy into a heat stream that is used to boil the working fluid of R134a, which was chosen as a good ORC working fluid because it has a low boiling point as well as a low ODP and GWP value. Many recent studies have studied solar-ORC both from a theoretical and experimental point of view in various areas, especially in design system. In this study, the preliminary design that overcomes the need for solar-ORC, including an analysis of energy, the efficiency of the system, and turboexpander characteristics using different pinch temperatures (10 °C and 5 °C) will be elaborated. The weather data in June is used for initial data input, for calculations in the PTC solar collector. The result shows that the ORC system with 5 °C has a better result in view of the energy from the turbine and the thermal efficiency, compared to the ORC system with 10 °C.