Influence of Working Fluid Composition on the Optimum Characteristics of Blended Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Cycles

Abstract

The supercritical Carbon Dioxide power cycle technology has attracted growing interest from the scientific community, becoming one of the most important options currently considered for CSP applications. This is thanks to its high thermal efficiency, even at moderate turbine inlet temperatures, and small footprint. Nevertheless, sCO2 power cycles require a fairly low compressor inlet temperature to exploit their full thermodynamic potential. When this cannot be achieved, as it is usually the case for Concentrated Solar Power plants where ambient temperatures are high, the interest of the technology is compromised. To compensate for this effect, the SCARABEUS project is working on the development of certain chemical dopants that could be added to the raw CO2, obtaining new working fluids with the same or even better performance than pure CO2 even at higher minimum cycle temperatures. This paper studies the impact of using CO2 mixtures blended with Hexaflurorobenzene (C6F6) and Titanium Tetrachloride (TiCl4). It is found that these mixtures enable thermal efficiencies that are higher than if pure CO2 were used. The efficiency gain can be as high as 3 percentage points, depending on the dopant used and the operating conditions considered. In addition to this absolute performance gain, the paper reveals that there are additional degrees of freedom that enable more effective cycle optimisation. These are the dopant molar content, not only its composition, and the cycle layout used. When this is studied, it is found that the optimum molar content ranges from 10 to 20% and that the layouts of interest when using mixtures are simpler than if plain CO2 were used. These results open the way for a significant performance enhancement of Concentrated Solar Power plants.