Author : Abhijeet Chaudhari, A.K Karthikeyan and V. V Ganoreϯ

Recovery of waste heat from energy conversion or usage of renewable energy to cut down the fossil fuel consumption which in turn leads to environmental difficulties like Global temperature rise, harmful effects on ozone layer, rapid rise in air pollution and smog is the urgent action required. Hence development of new energy conversion techniques which will efficiently utilize the energy resources for power generation without polluting environment is need of an hour.Typical low-grade heat resources like solar heat, geothermal energy and waste heat such as industrial processes, power systems, ICE, solar collector and OTEC are perfect candidates for new energy resources as their temperature ranges from 60 to 200oC. Energy source generation using low grade heat recovery can be studied using power turbine cycles. Invention of lower boiling point organic fluids has provided Rankine cycle with low temperature heat sources. ORC has been proved to be a very promising technology to utilize the low grade heat. The research is aimed at exploring the opportunity of realizing, with low economic cost, heat recovery system with the following characteristics: Evaporation temperature of 150oC-200oC, suitable for industrial heat recovery., Condenser cooling by ambient temperature water, which can be further used for other applications such as process heating and Development of low cost organic fluid turbine for small scale heat recovery applications.

Keywords: Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC), Thermal Efficiency, de Laval Turbine, Toluene