Solar driven Power production using CO2 as working fluid

This thesis work, titled as Experimental and computational research on the feasibility of solar driven power production in Rankine cycle using CO_2 as working fluid , involves the study of Rankine cycle in power production and CO_2 characteristics in heat transfer, especially its features in super-critical phase. The conceptual construction of solar collector is not actually installed, but a heat pump cycle was added in order to serve as a relatively low input heat source temperature. The proposed system under this concept was operated and the corresponding test results were collected and analyzed. According to the test results and the analysis, the feasibility of this system was abundantly confirmed. The system shows a great and promising potential in application. However, as the components of the test rig, especially the expander and pump did not seem to be functioning properly and stably when the CO_2 working fluid was under higher temperature and higher pressure. Therefore, a computational model was established in Dymola software and validated according to the acquired data from the tests, for the sake of extending the working condition virtually. In the simulation, the input heat source temperature was raised from 80 ℃ to as high as 200 ℃, the consequences of which indicated that the power production climbed significantly under such working condition. As a conclusion, the simulation proved that it is of great value to modify this test rig for better performance under further working condition and the future of its application is very promising