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Rankine cycle
The Rankine cycle is a cycle that converts heat into work. The heat is supplied externally to a closed loop, which usually uses water. This cycle generates about 80% of all electric power used throughout the world, including virtually all solar thermal, biomass, coal and nuclear power plants. It is named after William John Macquorn Rankine, a Scottish polymath. The Rankine cycle is the fundamental thermodynamic underpinning of the steam engine.
Description
A Rankine cycle describes a model of steam-operated heat engine most commonly found in power generation plants. Common heat sources for power plants using the Rankine cycle are the combustion of coal, natural gas and oil, and nuclear fission. The Rankine cycle is sometimes referred to as a practical Carnot cycle because, when an efficient turbine is used, the TS diagram begins to resemble the Carnot cycle. The main difference is that heat addition (in the Physical layout of the four main devices used in the Rankine cycle boiler) and rejection (in the condenser) are isobaric in the Rankine cycle and isothermal in the theoretical Carnot cycle. A pump is used to pressurize the working fluid received from the condenser as a liquid instead of as a gas. All of the energy in pumping the working fluid through the complete cycle is lost, as is most of the energy of vaporization of the working fluid in the boiler. This energy is lost to the cycle because the condensation that can take place in the turbine is limited to about 10% in order to minimize blade erosion; the vaporization energy is rejected from the cycle through the condenser. But pumping the working fluid through the cycle as a liquid requires a very small fraction of the energy needed to transport it as compared to compressing the working fluid as a gas in a compressor (as in the Carnot cycle). The efficiency of a Rankine cycle is usually limited by the working fluid. Without the pressure reaching super critical levels for the working fluid, the temperature range the cycle can operate over is quite small: turbine entry temperatures are typically 565C (the creep limit of stainless steel) and condenser temperatures are around 30C. This gives a theoretical Carnot efficiency of about 63% compared with an actual efficiency of 42% for a modern coal-fired power station. This low turbine entry temperature (compared with a gas turbine) is why the Rankine cycle is often used as a bottoming cycle in combined-cycle gas turbine power stations. The working fluid in a Rankine cycle follows a closed loop and is reused constantly. The water vapor with entrained droplets often seen billowing from power stations is generated by the cooling systems (not from the closed-loop Rankine power cycle) and represents the waste energy heat (pumping and vaporization) that could not be converted to useful work in the turbine. Note that cooling towers operate using the latent heat of vaporization of the cooling fluid. While many substances could be used in the Rankine cycle, water is usually the fluid of choice due to its favorable properties, such as nontoxic and unreactive chemistry, abundance, and low cost, as well as its thermodynamic properties.
Rankine cycle One of the principal advantages the Rankine cycle holds over others is that during the compression stage relatively little work is required to drive the pump, the working fluid being in its liquid phase at this point. By condensing the fluid, the work required by the pump consumes only 1% to 3% of the turbine power and contributes to a much higher efficiency for a real cycle. The benefit of this is lost somewhat due to the lower heat addition temperature. Gas turbines, for instance, have turbine entry temperatures approaching 1500C. Nonetheless, the efficiencies of actual large steam cycles and large modern gas turbines are fairly well matched.
Variables
Rankine cycle
Heat flow rate to or from the system (energy per unit time) Mass flow rate (mass per unit time) Mechanical power consumed by or provided to the system (energy per unit time) Thermodynamic efficiency of the process (net power output per heat input, dimensionless) Isentropic efficiency of the compression (feed pump) and expansion (turbine) processes, dimensionless The "specific enthalpies" at indicated points on the T-S diagram The final "specific enthalpy" of the fluid if the turbine were isentropic The pressures before and after the compression process
Equations
In general, the efficiency of a simple Rankine cycle can be defined as:
Each of the next four equations[1] is easily derived from the energy and mass balance for a control volume. defines the thermodynamic efficiency of the cycle as the ratio of net power output to heat input. As the work required by the pump is often around 1% of the turbine work output, it can be simplified.
When dealing with the efficiencies of the turbines and pumps, an adjustment to the work terms must be made.
pump
/ /
= =
p/pump -
)/pump
turbine
)*turbine
Rankine cycle
The overall thermodynamic efficiency (of almost any cycle) can be increased by raising the average heat input temperature of that cycle. Increasing the temperature of the steam into the superheat region is
Rankine cycle a simple way of doing this. There are also variations of the basic Rankine cycle which are designed to raise the thermal efficiency of the cycle in this way; two of these are described below. Rankine cycle with reheat In this variation, two turbines work in series. The first accepts vapor from the boiler at high pressure. After the vapor has passed through the first turbine, it re-enters the boiler and is reheated before passing through a second, lower pressure turbine. Among other advantages, this prevents the vapor from condensing during its expansion which can seriously damage the turbine blades, and improves the efficiency of the cycle, as more of the heat flow into the cycle occurs at higher temperature.
Rankine cycle
References
[1] Canada, Scott; G. Cohen, R. Cable, D. Brosseau, and H. Price (2004-10-25). "Parabolic Trough Organic Rankine Cycle Solar Power Plant" (http:/ / www. nrel. gov/ csp/ troughnet/ pdfs/ 37077. pdf). 2004 DOE Solar Energy Technologies (Denver, Colorado: US Department of Energy NREL). . Retrieved 2009-03-17. [2] Batton, Bill (2000-06-18). "Organic Rankine Cycle Engines for Solar Power" (http:/ / www. nrel. gov/ csp/ troughnet/ pdfs/ batton_orc. pdf). Solar 2000 conference. Barber-Nichols, Inc.. . Retrieved 2009-03-18. [3] Nielsen et al., 2005, Proc. Int. Solar Energy Soc.
^Van Wyllen 'Fundamentals of thermodynamics' (ISBN 85-212-0327-6) Moran & Shapiro 'Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics' (ISBN 0-471-27471-2) Wikibooks Engineering Thermodynamics (http://wikibooks.org/wiki/ Applications_(Engineering_Thermodynamics)#Rankine_Cycle)
License
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