Proposal and Thermodynamic Assessment of S-CO₂ Brayton Cycle Layout for Improved Heat Recovery

This article deals with the thermodynamic assessment of supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO₂) Brayton power cycles. The main advantage of S-CO₂ cycles is the capability of achieving higher efficiencies at significantly lower temperatures in comparison to conventional steam Rankine cycles. In the past decade, variety of configurations and layouts of S-CO₂ cycles have been investigated targeting efficiency improvement. In this paper, four different layouts have been studied (with and without reheat): Simple Brayton cycle, Recompression Brayton cycle, Recompression Brayton cycle with partial cooling and the proposed layout called Recompression Brayton cycle with partial cooling and improved heat recovery (RBC-PC-IHR). Energetic and exergetic performances of all configurations were analyzed. Simple configuration is the least efficient due to poor heat recovery mechanism. RBC-PC-IHR layout achieved the best thermal performance in both reheat and no reheat configurations ( η t h   = 59.7% with reheat and η t h   = 58.2 without reheat at 850 °C), which was due to better heat recovery in comparison to other layouts. The detailed component-wise exergy analysis shows that the turbines and compressors have minimal contribution towards exergy destruction in comparison to what is lost by heat exchangers and heat source.