This paper presents a preliminary study about a combined-cycle engine based on a turboshaft engine and an organic-Rankine-cycle (ORC) bottoming unit to be used onboard an aircraft with a turboelectric propulsion system. The aim is to analyse whether benefits with respect to mission fuel consumption can be derived by employing such a combined-cycle
engine when compared to a simple-cycle turboshaft engine. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary optimization framework is developed, incorporating models for the engine, ORC system, ORC turbine, heat exchangers, and mission analysis. This framework is coupled with an optimizer to identify the optimal combined-cycle engine design for minimum mission fuel consumption. The results suggest that fuel savings of around 1.5% are possible with the optimized system if compared to the aircraft employing turboshaft engines. Heat exchanger volume is identified as the most constraining parameter when it comes to combined-cycle performance. The analysis of the results suggests as aspects which might lead to further improvements the evaluation of other ORC architectures, working fluids and heat exchanger topologies.@en

The use of mixtures as working fluids of organic Rankine cycle (ORC) waste heat recovery (WHR) power plants has been proposed in the past to improve the matching between the temperature profile of the hot and the cold streams of condensers and evaporators, thus to possibly increase the energy conversion efficiency of the system. The goal of this study is to assess the benefits in terms of efficiency, environmental (GWP) and operational safety (flammability) that can be obtained by selecting optimal binary mixtures as working fluids of air-cooled ORC bottoming power plants of medium-capacity industrial gas turbines. Furthermore, two thermodynamic cycle configurations are analyzed, namely the simple recuperated cycle and the so-called split-cycle configurations. The benchmark case is a combined cycle power plant formed by an industrial gas turbine and an air-cooled recuperated ORC power unit with cyclopentane as the working fluid. The results of this study indicate that binary mixtures provide the designer with a wider choice of optimal working fluids, however, in the case of the recuperated-cycle configuration, no improvement in terms of combined cycle efficiency over the benchmark case can be achieved. The split-cycle configuration leads to an increase of combined cycle efficiency of the order of 1.5%, both in case of pure and blended working fluids. Furthermore, for this cycle configuration the use of Novec 649 as working fluid is advantageous because it is environmentally and operationally safe, and it does not involve any penalty in terms of combined cycle efficiency if compared to the benchmark case. Additionally, the use of this fluid would lead to a more compact turbine, as the corresponding thermodynamic cycle would determine a turbine volume flow ratio that is half of the value of the benchmark case and a specific enthalpy difference over the expansion that is one fifth.

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Waste heat recovery (WHR) from aero engines via compact organic Rankine cycle (ORC) units may increase the fuel efficiency of air transportation. Heat exchangers are arguably the key components of ORC systems for aeronautical applications and their design must be optimized to guarantee the best trade-off between fluid pressure drop, weight, and induced aircraft drag. At present, no heat exchanger design guidelines are available for waste heat recovery systems aboard aircraft. This study, thus, contributes to defining a proper design methodology for ORC systems of such applications. The chosen
test case is a supercritical ORC system with cyclopentane as the working fluid, which recovers waste heat from the auxiliary power unit of an aircraft. The exhaust gas temperature and mass flow rate of the power unit are known and kept constant in the analysis, and so are the ambient conditions, which define the cold sink of the ORC turbogenerator. Three design strategies targeting the minimum mass and maximum net power output of the ORC unit have been assessed. In the first one, the multi-objective optimization is performed by prescribing a priori the geometry and frontal area of the heat exchangers.
Thus, only the cycle parameters are optimized. The second method tackles, instead, the simultaneous optimization of the geometric parameters of the condenser and the cycle parameters. It was found that the integrated design allows for system mass reduction by 10 - 12% for a given ORC power output, highlighting the importance of performing the simultaneous optimization of the thermodynamic process and the heat exchanger geometry. Finally, the third method addresses the same optimal design problem by leveraging a reduced-order model of the condenser to predict the optimal design space of this component. The generated Pareto front obtained with this method is very similar to that found by optimizing simultaneously the complete condenser geometry and the cycle parameters. The mean deviation is about 2%. With just one heat exchanger surrogate model, the Pareto front was generated in one-fourth of the computational time. This is due to the lower number of optimization variables and the faster objective function evaluation.@en

This paper presents a preliminary study about a combined-cycle engine based on a turboshaft engine and an organic-Rankine-cycle (ORC) bottoming unit to be used onboard an aircraft with a turboelectric propulsion system. The aim is to analyse whether benefits with respect to mission fuel consumption can be derived by employing such a combined-cycle engine when compared to a simple-cycle turboshaft engine. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary optimization framework is developed, incorporating models for the engine, ORC system, ORC turbine, heat exchangers, and mission analysis. This framework is coupled with an optimizer to identify the optimal combined-cycle engine design for minimum mission fuel consumption. The results suggest that fuel savings of around 4% are possible with the optimized system if compared to the aircraft employing turboshaft engines. Heat exchanger volume is identified as the most constraining parameter when it comes to combined-cycle performance. The analysis of the results suggests as aspects which might lead to further improvements the evaluation of other ORC architectures, working fluids and heat exchanger topologies.@en