KCORC Scholarships

Recipients of the ASME ORC 2013 Scholarship (1st call for proposals)

Davide Ziviani

I am Davide Ziviani, PhD student at Ghent University (Belgium) and I have been granted with the KCORC Scholarship for the research project “Organic Rankine Cycle with Liquid Flooded Expansion (ORCLFE) using a Screw Expander and Internal Heat Regeneration for Waste Heat Recovery” under the supervision of Prof. Eckhard A. Groll from Purdue University (Indiana, USA). The Scholarship covers the expenses during the stay at Purdue University from May to October 2014.
The project focuses on evaluating the performance of a twin-screw expander with significant amounts of flooding, in order to investigate the improvements on the overall efficiency of an ORC system.  Furthermore, flooded expansion with internal regeneration offer significant efficiency improvements to ORC system
Due to the presence of the liquid phase, positive displacement expanders play a crucial role to ensure the power output from the system. A detailed expander simulation model will be developed that combines the aspects of the hydraulic expansion of the liquid and the simultaneous expansion of the superheated vapor.  First, the model will be based on a geometric description of the expander, which will allow the integration of a multi-chamber approach in order to compute the leakage flows accurately. Secondly, by introducing different control volumes for gas and liquid phases, the heat transfer rate can be calculated and, consequently, the impact of different flooding-ratios can be predicted.
Liquid-flooded expansion is a novel concept and until now the scientific literature on the subject is limited. Since the overall efficiency of a screw-type volumetric expander is generally higher than that of a scroll expander, evaluating the performance of the ORCLFE is particularly promising. Proving the feasibility of quasi-isothermal expansion experimentally, represents an important achievement for the whole ORC community and opens the door to new highly efficient solutions for ORC systems.

The projet results have been submitted for publication: D. Ziviani, B.J. Woodland, E. Georges, E.A. Groll, J.E. Braun, T.W. Horton, M. De Paepe, M. van den Broek. Development of general organic Rankine cycle simulation tool:ORCSIM. ECOS 2015 - The 28th International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems, June 30 - July 3, Pau, France.

and  D. Ziviani, B.J. Woodland, E. Georges, E.A. Groll, J.E. Braun, T.W. Horton, M. De Paepe, M. van den Broek. ORCSIM: A Generalized organic Rankine cycle simulation tool. ASME ORC 2015 - 3rd International Seminar on ORC Power Systems, October 12-14, Brussels, Belgium

 

Leonardo Pierobon
I am Leonardo Pierobon and I shall use the KCORC Scholarship for Virtual prototyping of mini-ORC power units for rapid design development and implementation. This project aims at developing an open-source simulation tool for the design of high-efficiency and cost-competitive organic Rankine cycle (ORC) turbogenerators based on the virtual prototyping concept. Design 1-D and 2-D models of plant´s constituents will be included in a component library after an in-depth validation against numeric values available in the literature and with experimental data from test facilities. The steady-state models will thus serve to construct virtual prototypes of ORC power units. Different design candidates will then be tested under severe operating conditions with dynamic models to spot possible system malfunctions. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark and the Delft University of Technology.
 

Konstantinos Braimakis
I am Konstantinos Braimakis and I am currently participating in research regarding innovative ORC improvement strategies such as the supercritical ORC and the utilization of zeotropic mixtures as working fluids by following a holistic approach including not only thermodynamic but also technical and economic criteria. Furthermore, I am involved in the development of an ORC-micro scale power plant (15 kWe) aimed at investigating the potential of the ORC for waste heat-to-power conversion (http://kcorc.org/en/rd-projects/orc-micro-power-plant/). The mentioned project is extended until 2015 in order to build up an ORC test field for different kinds of turbines, evaporators and plant designs.

The projet results have been published in: K. Braimakis, A.-D. Leontaritis, M. Preißinger, S. Karellas, D. Brüggeman and K. Panopoulos. Waste heat recovery with innovative low-temperature Organic Rankine Cycle based on natural refrigerants. In Proceedings of ECOS 2014 - The 27th International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems June 15-19, 2014, Turku, Finland.

The results have been published in the ECOS 2014 special issue of the journal Energy: Low grade waste heat recovery with subcritical and supercritical Organic Rankine Cycle based on natural refrigerants and their binary mixtures.

 

Huixing Zhai
I am Huixing Zhai from Tsinghua University. My short-term research project will deal with the simulation of waste heat recovery ORC system using mixtures as working fluid. I will participate to the ongoing work in Liège regarding fluid mixtures modeling, and will integrate this mixtures model in a more general optimiztion model of the waste heat recovery ORC system.

 

Emiliano Casati

I am Emiliano Casati, PhD candidate at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. I will be defending my thesis next September and, afterwords, I will continue as a PostDoc researcher in another institution. The funding provided by this scholarship will allow me to keep on collaborating with my colleagues
at TU Delft, working at the FAST experimental setup to finally achieve the goal of proving the existence of the rarefaction shock wave.