Experiment and Simulation of the Startup Processes for the Supercritical Carbon-Dioxide Closed Brayton Cycle

Abstract

The startup process is the crucial transition phase of the supercritical carbon-dioxide Brayton cycle, so it is essential to focus on and investigate the transient performance for the system’s safety and stability. The pressure in the buffer tank approaches the safety upper limit with different startup schemes during the joint commissioning of the compressor and heater in a MWe-scale experiment system, while the maximum temperature is 309 °C. Hence, dynamic simulations are carried out to explore the dynamic startup characteristics from a cold state or a warm state to the turbine pre-start condition, in which 60% of the rated mass flow rate and 67% of the rated compressor speed are reached in the end. The results show that, when starting from a cold state, the startup scheme of simultaneously heating and speeding up has a limited effective application scope. Two venting operations during the above process help the system establish heat regeneration and promote temperature uniformity in the system. Furthermore, when starting from a warm state with an existing temperature gradient in the system, the startup scheme of simultaneously heating and speeding up is more effective and has a more extensive range of control.

Keywords

• supercritical CO₂ Brayton cycle
• startup
• simulation