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Three novel geothermal-based organic Rankine cycle (ORC) systems are proposed to enhance the efficiency and for waste heat recovery purpose. The proposed systems are modeled based on a basic ORC system (concept 1), an ORC system with an internal heat exchanger (concept 2), and a regenerative ORC system (concept 3). Accordingly, two thermoelectric generators (TEG) are introduced into the systems to exploit the waste heat of the system. The condenser is replaced with a TEG unit while the other TEG unit is used to recover the waste heat of the reinjected geothermal fluid. A comprehensive numerical investigation is conducted to compare the proposed systems from the thermodynamic and thermo-economic points of view. Furthermore, the most favorable proposed system is considered for optimization purposes and multi-objective optimization using the genetic algorithm is performed. Accordingly, a Pareto frontier is extracted consisting of the optimal solutions along with the scatter distribution of the critical parameters. The results indicate that the third proposed concept holds the highest exergy and energy efficiency among the studied systems. Also, the concept concludes the highest power output from the employed TEG units. The results further show that the first concept has the lowest associated cost with the system and the smallest payback period and at the same time higher net power generation. At the baseline of the systems, the exergy efficiencies are 59.39%, 57.92%, and 60.27%, and the total product costs are 25.8 $/GJ, 28.79 $/GJ, and 31.27 $/GJ for the first, the second, and the third proposed concepts, respectively. Results of the multi-objective optimization of the third concept reveal that the superheater temperature difference should be kept at higher values while the optimal range of the figure of merit is between 0.9 to 1.6. The proposed systems can be designed practically to exploit the geothermal heat source and recover the waste heat of the system.

Ground source heat pump, due to high coefficient of performance (COP) and use of low-temperature thermal energy source, is one of the best technologies to use renewable energy resources. In this work, at first, a geothermal heat pump for heating with an economizer is simulated, and then the effects of the variations in different parameters such as evaporator pressure, condensation pressure, and intermediate pressure on heat pump and total COP and exergy efficiency are analyzed. Initially, the thermodynamic simulation of the system is performed for different working fluids (R134a, R-12, R152a, R1234yf, and R1234ze(E)) in the EES software programming environment. The COP and exergy efficiency are calculated for different working fluids and obtained optimal values. The best overall coefficient of performance of the system is related to fluid R134a with a value of 3.663 and the best overall exergy efficiency of the system is related to fluid R1234ze(E) with a value of 0.5517. The lowest PCEU value is for fluid R152a with 0.01247$ per kilowatt. It can be concluded that by reducing the evaporator pressure of the cycle, the cost of producing an energy unit will be cheaper and by reducing the middle pressure of the cycle, the cost of producing an energy unit will be more expensive.

In this study, a novel thermoeconomic optimization method that is simple and efficient, for real complex cycles is introduced. First, a thermoeconomic analysis method that is called non-linear simplex direct search method is improved for the purposes of this study. The objective of this paper is to apply this method to four cogeneration cycles that are simple cycle, inlet air cooling cycle, air preheated and air-fuel preheated cycles for analyzing and optimizing. The four cycles are thermoeconomically optimized for constant power and steam mass (30MW and 14kg/s saturated steam flow rate at 2000kPa), for constant power (30MW) and for variable steam mass, and for variable power and steam mass by using the cost equation method and the effect of size on equipment method. The results obtained by the effect of size on equipment and by the cost equations methods are very different from each other. For the case of global optimization, the optimum electricity costs which also correspond to minimum are obtained as 0,0432$/kWh for simple cycle, 0,0514$/kWh for inlet air cooling cycle 0,0577$/kWh for air preheated cycle and 0,058$/kWh for air-fuel preheated cycle by using cost equations method. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

To improve the performances of the Organic Rankine cycle, several advanced cycle designs are proposed. Because different studies use varying boundary conditions, an assessment of the benefit of the cycle designs is complicated. Furthermore, the inclusion of economic parameters is valuable for a sound comparison. In this work, the subcritical cycle, the trilateral cycle and the transcritical cycle are compared on a thermodynamic and economic basis. The investigated cycles are optimized for three waste heat recovery cases within a temperature range of 100 °C to 300 °C. From a pure thermodynamic analysis only a marginal performance benefit is achieved for high temperature cases with the working fluids under consideration. Therefore, a thermo-economic analysis is provided for the low-temperature case. A multi-objective optimization is at the basis of the thermo-economic analysis and comparison. The thermodynamic performance of the cycles is compared with equal boundary conditions and actual cases are used. The results of such investigation are particularly interesting for manufacturers of ORCs. Keywords Organic Rankine Cycle; Thermo-economic; Multi-objective optimization; Advanced ORC architectures

High-speed crafts suffer from losing a huge amount of their machinery energy in the form of heat loss with the exhaust gases. This will surely increase the annual operating cost of this type of ships and an adverse effect on the environment. This paper introduces a suggestion that may contribute to overcoming such problems. It presents the possibility of reusing the energy lost by the ships' exhaust gases as heating source for an absorption air condition unit onboard high-speed crafts. As a numerical example; the proposed method was investigated at a high-speed craft operating in Red Sea between Egypt and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The results obtained are very satisfactory. It showed the possibility of providing the required ship's air condition cooling load during sailing and in port. Economically, this will reduce the annual ship's operating cost. Moreover, it will achieve a valuable reduction of ship's emissions.