New Knowledge on the Performance of Supercritical Brayton Cycle with CO₂-Based Mixtures

Abstract

As one of the promising technologies to meet the increasing demand for electricity, supercritical CO2 (S-CO2) Brayton cycle has the characteristics of high efficiency, economic structure, and compact turbomachinery. These characteristics are closely related to the thermodynamic properties of working fluid. When CO2 is mixed with other gas, cycle parameters are determined by the constituent and the mass fraction of CO2. Therefore, in this contribution, a thermodynamic model is developed and validated for the recompression cycle. Seven types of CO2-based mixtures, namely CO2-Xe, CO2-Kr, CO2-O2, CO2-Ar, CO2-N2, CO2-Ne, and CO2-He, are employed. At different CO2 mass fractions, cycle parameters are determined under a fixed compressor inlet temperature, based on the maximization of cycle efficiency. Cycle performance and recuperators’ parameters are comprehensively compared for different CO2-based mixtures. Furthermore, in order to investigate the effect of compressor inlet temperature, cycle parameters of CO2-N2 are obtained under four different temperatures. From the obtained results, it can be concluded that, as the mass fraction of CO2 increases, different mixtures show different variations of cycle performance and recuperators’ parameters. In generally, the performance order of mixtures coincides with the descending or ascending order of corresponding critical temperatures. Performance curves of these considered mixtures locate between the curves of CO2-Xe and CO2-He. Meanwhile, the curves of CO2-O2 and CO2-N2 are always closed to each other at high CO2 mass fractions. In addition, with the increase of compressor inlet temperature, cycle performance decreases, and more heat transfer occurs in the recuperators.

Keywords

• supercritical Brayton cycle
• CO₂-based mixture
• thermodynamic performance
• compressor inlet temperature