Analysis Natural Gas SOFC-GT-ST-ORC Quadruple Cycle for Power Generation

摘要

Improvement of performances has been a major concern for the power industries. There has been many propositions over the past decade of single cycle ranging from the rankine/steam cycle (ST), brayton cycle/gas turbine (GT), organic rankine cycle (ORC), solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), through combined cycle to triple cycle power generation, aimed at increasing energy efficiency, reducing cost and pollutants emission, such as PMs, NO_x, SO_x, CO, VOCs, etc. and lowering greenhouse gas CO_2 emission. Researchers and power plant owners at some point have integrated these cycles to achieve a higher efficiency. Of such category are the SOFC-GT, SOFC-ST, SOFC-ORC, GT-ST, GT-ORC, and ST-ORC hybrid, combined cycle power generation. Other research engineers have considered triple cycle power generation, such as SOFC-GT-ST, SOFC-GT-ORC, and SOFC-ST-ORC. This research examines a novel quadruple cycle power generation system that integrates SOFC, GT, ST and ORC using natural gas as the primary fuel. Mathematical modeling of the SOFC-GT-ST-ORC quadruple cycle are developed and investigated. Preliminary results show that up to 80% power plant energy efficiency is obtainable for this quadruple cycle; which is much higher than the single cycle (30% - 45%), combined cycle (50% - 60%), and triple cycle (60% - 70%) power generation.