A study on the design of Waste Heat Recovery Unit (WHRU) for 30kW Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) power system for ships

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs the improvement of ship energy efficiency is emphasized internationally, researches for this are being conducted in various ways. Accordingly, research is being conducted on the application of ORC power generation systems for ships using waste heat from the main engine exhaust gas generated during operation. The WHRU constituting the ORC system must be designed so that stable-phase change heat transfer occurs. In this study, a design study was conducted using the ANSYS CFX program for the production of a WHRU capable of generating ORC power generation output for a 30-kW ship using R134a refrigerant. A WHRU capable of achieving 30 kW generation output performance was designed while changing various design elements (shape, tube diameter, number of tubes, number of stages, etc.) of the WHRU. As a result, it was confirmed that the refrigerant (R134a) in a liquid state at a temperature of 14.8°C entered at a flow rate of 1.06 kg/s, evaporated by the exhaust gas, and was discharged from the outlet in a state of vapor fraction 1 at a temperature of 56.4°C. The heat transfer rate of the WHRU was 219.2 kW, the pressure during the evaporation process was constant at 13.9 bar in absolute pressure, and the enthalpy was 220 kJ/kg at the inlet and 426 kJ/kg at the outlet, respectively.

Keywords

• waste heat recovery unit (WHRU)
• organic Rankine cycle (ORC)
• ship energy efficiency
• phase change
• computational fluid dynamic (CFD)