AVAILABILITY ANALYSIS OF ENGINEERING CYCLES

摘要

The paper presents an availability analysis of engineering cycles such as the Carnot, Brayton, Rankine, Otto and Diesel. A number of equations have been developed for the second law cycle efficiency when these cycles operate either as a power plant or a refrigerator and heat pump. Also presented is the concept of the coupling factor by which the second law cycle efficiency can be interchanged with the counterpart of the first law analysis. The coupling factor is not a constant, but a function of the temperature of the environmental state and the average temperature of heat addition or heat rejection process. The paper should be an interesting supplement to the current undergraduate texts in engineering thermodynamics.