Contribution to the design of the control of a supercritical CO2 power cycle by means of a system model in Simulink

Supercritical CO2 power cycles have experienced a significant surge in interest in recent years, primarily attributed to the distinctive properties of carbon dioxide when operating above its critical point. As a result, sCO2 Brayton loops bring about substantial improvements in efficiency and size compared to the widely recognized Rankine steam cycles. The interest of this thesis is centered around the design of the control and overall improvement of an existing model of a supercritical CO2 power cycle for fusion power applications. The improvement involves runtime optimization, implementation of a pressure and temperature control system at the compressor inlet, adding any useful new features, and increasing the overall efficiency of the cycle. The sCO2 model has been built on MATLAB-Simulink software, which is used for modeling, simulating, and analyzing multidomain dynamic systems. The reference cycle that was used to design the model was designed by a group at the Comillas Pontifical University, using the Engineering Equation Solver. In this thesis, the base model was first simulated and the results were compared against the reference cycle. The base model was then modified by adding new features, a pressure and temperature control system, and removing the fixed mass flow source, and then the results from the modified model were compared against the base model, which showed a decrease in the mass flow rate from 6912 kg/s to 6712 kg/s, reduction in compressor consumption, and a small increase in the overall efficiency from 36.4% to around 36.8