Investigation of an innovative cascade cycle combining a trilateral cycle and an organic Rankine cycle (TLC-ORC) for industry or transport application

An innovative cascade cycle combining a trilateral cycle and an organic Rankine cycle (TLC-ORC) system is proposed in this paper. The proposed TLC-ORC system aims at obtaining better performance of temperature matching between working fluid and heat source, leading to better overall system performance than that of the conventional dual-loop ORC system. The proposed cascade cycle adopts TLC to replace the High-Temperature (HT) cycle of the conventional dual-loop ORC system. The comprehensive comparisons between the conventional dual-loop ORC and the proposed TLC-ORC system have been conducted using the first and second law analysis. Effects of evaporating temperature for HT and Low-Temperature (LT) cycle, as well as different HT and LT working fluids, are systematically investigated. The comparisons of exergy destruction and exergy efficiency of each component in the two systems have been studied. Results illustrate that the maximum net power output, thermal efficiency, and exergy efficiency of a conventional dual-loop ORC are 8.8 kW, 18.7%, and 50.0%, respectively, obtained by the system using cyclohexane as HT working fluid at THT,evap = 470 K and TLT,evap = 343 K. While for the TLC-ORC, the corresponding values are 11.8 kW, 25.0%, and 65.6%, obtained by the system using toluene as a HT working fluid at THT,evap = 470 K and TLT,evap = 343 K, which are 34.1%, 33.7%, and 31.2% higher than that of a conventional dual-loop ORC