Title: Heat source temperature control investigation of a hydraulic retarder based organic Rankine cycle

Authors: Ming Chen; Xuexun Guo; Gangfeng Tan

Addresses: Hubei Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Automotive Components, Automobile Engineering Institute, Hubei Collaborative Innovation Center for Automotive Components Technology, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China ' Hubei Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Automotive Components, Automobile Engineering Institute, Hubei Collaborative Innovation Center for Automotive Components Technology, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China ' Hubei Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology for Automotive Components, Automobile Engineering Institute, Hubei Collaborative Innovation Center for Automotive Components Technology, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430070, China

Abstract: In the paper, a hydraulic retarder based organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system is investigated. In order to achieve stable oil output temperature in the evaporator under different hydraulic retarder operating conditions, evaporating pressure is studied to match with a specified evaporator heat transfer area through iterative calculations. An experiment test is a setup to conduct the validation. The results show that regulating evaporating pressure can achieve a target evaporator oil output temperature. However, expander load moment and working fluid mass flow rate (MFR) need to be controlled precisely. With the increase of retarder rotor speed, required evaporating pressure generally decreases, while working fluid MFR increases dramatically. Effects of the changed evaporating pressures and MFR s on expander power output increases from 2.52 kW to 31.43 kW, while cycle thermal efficiency changes slightly in low filling rate condition, from 10.2% to 10.7% for 25% filling condition.

Keywords: hydraulic retarder; ORC; organic Rankine cycle; oil temperature control; evaporating pressure; condensing temperature.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVP.2017.086910

International Journal of Vehicle Performance, 2017 Vol.3 No.4, pp.365 - 379

Received: 05 Apr 2016
Accepted: 17 Jan 2017
Published online: 02 Oct 2017 *

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