Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental Investigation of Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) for Low Temperature Geothermal Fluid: Effect of Pump Rotation and R-134 Working Fluid in Scroll-Expander

Nugroho Agung Pambudi^1,*, Santiko Wibowo¹, Ranto¹, Lip Huat Saw²

1 Energy and Society Laboratory, Mechanical Engineering Education, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Surakarta, 57126, Indonesia
2 Lee Kong Chian Faculty of Engineering and Science, UTAR, Kajang, 43000, Malaysia

* Corresponding Author: Nugroho Agung Pambudi. Email:

Energy Engineering 2021, 118(5), 1565-1576. https://doi.org/10.32604/EE.2021.016642

Received 08 April 2021; Accepted 09 June 2021; Issue published 16 July 2021

Abstract

Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is one of the solutions to utilize a low temperature geothermal fluid for power generation. The ORC system can be placed at the exit of the separator to extract energy from brine. Furthermore, one of the main components of the system and very important is the pump. Therefore, in this research, the pump rotation is examined to investigate the effect on power output and energy efficiency for low temperature geothermal fluid. The rotation is determined by using an inverter with the following frequencies: 7.5, 10, 12.5, 15 and 17.5 Hz, respectively. R-134 working fluid is employed with 373.15 K evaporator temperature in relation to the low temperature of the geothermal fluid. Furthermore, the condenser temperature and fluid pressure were set up to 293.15 K and 5 × 10⁵ Pa, respectively. This research uses a DC generator with a maximum power of 750 Watt and the piping system is made from copper alloy C12200 ASTM B280 with size 1.905 × 10⁻² m and a thickness of 8 × 10⁻⁴ m. The results showed that there is an increase in mass flow rate, enthalpy and generator power output along with increasing pump rotation. In addition, it showed that the maximum generator output power was 377.31 Watt at the highest pump rotation with a frequency of 17.5 Hz.

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