Innovative Expanders for Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Cycles

Supercritical carbon dioxide plants are attracting strong interest, particularly for distributed power generation, thanks to the high-power density, allowing high compactness and efficiencies due to the particular features of the fluid conditions near the critical point. In the present work, the feasibility of innovative turboexpanders is evaluated for the first European demonstrator of MW size, coupling small volumetric flows with technological simplicity, typical of these types of plants. In particular, the possibility of replacing conventional turbines with bladeless expanders is studied, proposing a design in line with those achievable by small radial and axial turbomachines. The bladeless expanders consist of flat parallel disks mounted on a shaft, separated by spacers to maintain small gaps between them. The laminar flow inside the rotor makes it highly efficient: however, rotor-stator interaction losses reduce the overall performance. Such bladeless expanders maintain high interest for their capability to tackle low volumetric flows, their relatively simple design and ease of manufacturability. The design case presented in this paper is the feasibility study of a single modular bladeless expander using the existing conventional design (axial and radial stages) as the reference design. 3D numerical analysis is carried out using commercial computational fluid dynamic software. The results show ∼55% total static efficiency of the bladeless expander at 37000 rpm for approximately 1.25MW output power. The impact on performance at different nozzle throat cross-sections and rotor disks diameter has been discussed. The overall performance of the expander is presented by evaluating the losses and improvement strategies that are discussed.