Performance Assessment for High Temperature OTEC plant

Abstract

In this paper, an Organic Rankine Cycle was designed and fabricated to perform an experiment on the 200kW H-OTEC plant. The H-OTEC plant was installed in Seawater Utilization Plant Research Center in Gosung-gun, Gangwon-do, Korea. The plant has R245fa working fluid along with a 75oC heat source and a 5oC heat sink, which make for a 70oC temperature difference. With the 75oC heat source temperature, the evaporation temperature in the evaporator is 60oC, and the evaporation pressure is 463 kPa. With the 5oC heat sink temperature, the condensation temperature in the condenser is 12oC, and the condensation pressure is 90 kPa. The required working fluid mass flow rate is approximately 10 kg/s. When the heat quantity fed into the evaporator is 2321.67 kW, the cycle efficiency is designed to be approximately 8%. The H-OTEC plant has two identical and parallel 100kW modules. And, in this study, the results for the design, manufacture, installation, and operation for the module No. 1 of 200kW H-OTEC plant were introduced, which can be used as the basic data for the design of commercial H-OTEC plants .