Renewable Energy 37 (2012) 76e81

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Renewable Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/renene

An integrated solar-cryogen hybrid power system

Yongliang Li a, Xiang Wang b, Yi Jin b, Yulong Ding a, b, *
a b

Institute of Particle Science & Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Complex Systems, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history: Received 4 April 2011 Accepted 24 May 2011 Available online 25 June 2011 Keywords: Cryogenic energy storage Solar thermal power Power system optimisation

a b s t r a c t
This paper reports a new integrated solar-cryogen hybrid power system that uses solar thermal energy and cryogen as the feedstocks. The system consists of a direct expansion (open cycle) of cryogen from an elevated pressure and a closed-loop Brayton cycle operated at a medium to low pressure. The expansion occurs sequentially in three stages (high pressure, medium and low pressure turbines) using solar heat as the superheating source. The open cycle uses all the three turbines, whereas the closed cycle only uses the medium and low pressure turbines. A solar thermal power system and a cryogen fuelled power system are used as the benchmarks to evaluate the performance of the newly proposed hybrid system and the three systems are optimised using a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. The results show that the integrated hybrid system gives a far better overall system efciency and provides over 30% more power output that the summation of the power outputs of the two other systems. Crown Copyright 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Energy and environment are two of the most concerning issues in the current world. For over a century cheap, plentiful fossil energy has been supporting the industrialization and the increasingly higher living standards. However, increasing energy demand particularly in developing countries implies depletion of the fossil fuel resources at a rapid rate. In the meantime, the use of fossil fuels continues to cause environmental degradation. All these call for the use of new and renewable energy resources. Currently, renewable energy contributes to only 11% of the world primary energy and this is expected to increase to 60% by 2070 [1]. Solar energy is one of the most promising clean and non-depleting sources that is able to full the increasing energy demands. Apart from direct heating applications, solar energy can be converted to electrical energy in two main ways. One is through solar cells (photovoltaic technology), which convert the diffuse radiation to electrical energy directly. The other is via an indirect solar thermal route, which converts the solar radiation to thermal energy by means of solar collectors or concentrators and then generating electricity through a conventional thermal cycle. Solar cells are most suitable for small scale low-power demands, while solar thermal power plant is often a better option for large-scale and grid-connected systems [2,3].

* Corresponding author. Institute of Particle Science & Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. Tel.: 44 0 1133432747. E-mail address: y.ding@leeds.ac.uk (Y. Ding).

This work is concerned about improving the indirect power generation via the solar thermal route in a solar thermal power plant (STPP). The STPP is a conventional power station that obtains all or parts of its thermal energy load by concentrating solar radiation, producing high temperature solar heat to activate a Rankine power cycle. In this process the concentrated solar radiation does not heat the working uid of the power cycle directly but uses a solar energy carrier, which transport the solar radiation to storage vessel and also transfer the heat to the working uid. The use of heat carrier has an advantage of more precise control of quality and quantity of vapour of the working uid according to the needs. In addition, the use of storage and a heat carrier also enables the mass ow rate of the working uid to be optimised independent of the uctuations either or both of the load and solar radiation [4,5]. The stored thermal energy can be used to either pre-heat water/ steam in steam cycle power plants [6] or superheat the steam in combined cycle power plants [7,8] or even produce steam directly in Direct Steam Generation (DSG) [4,9]. Generally in these cycles water/steam or other organic liquids are selected as the working uid and the solar energy is stored in the form of high temperature sensible heat. It is therefore less efcient when taking the behaviour of the solar thermal energy carrier into account due to temperature glide mismatching between the solar thermal energy carrier and the working uid. This work is also concerned with efcient extraction of cold energy from cryogens. A cryogen is generally dened as a liquid that boils at below 150  C and contains a considerable amount of cryogenic exergy (thermal energy in the form of extremely low

0960-1481/$ e see front matter Crown Copyright 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.renene.2011.05.038

Y. Li et al. / Renewable Energy 37 (2012) 76e81

77

temperature cold) [10]. A lot of efforts have been made in cryogen production (gas liquefaction) processes over the past few decades with fast developments of liqueed natural gas (LNG) industry. For example, it is estimated that the amount of LNG imported to China is 20 million tons by end of 2010 [11]. However, efcient recovery of the cryogenic energy is a challenge during the evaporation process without providing some heat to increase the temperature difference. This constitutes the primary motivation of working on integrating the solar thermal and cryogen power systems. This integration, as will be seen later, will provide a high overall energy efciency and alleviate environmental impact of the re-gasication processes of cryogens. In addition, liquid nitrogen/air has recently been proposed for use as a fuel as well as an energy carrier for offpeak electricity and renewable sources [12e17]. This has led to various theoretical and experimental studies on extracting cryogenic energy using either a direct expansion method or a combined cycle method [10,11,18e22]. These studies reveal that cryogen is a more efcient working uid than water/steam in extracting thermal heat [10]. In this work, an integrated solar-cryogen hybrid power system is proposed and analyzed. A solar thermal power system and a cryogen fuelled power system are used as the benchmarks to evaluate the performance of the newly proposed integrated system and the three systems are optimised using a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. As will be shown later in this paper, the integrated solar-cryogen hybrid system gives far better overall system efciency. 2. Thermodynamic systems and modelling methodologies In this section, analyses will be carried out on the three power systems of (i) Solar thermal power system, (ii) cryogen fuelled power system and (iii) solar-cryogen hybrid power system, where (i) and (ii) are used as the benchmarks for evaluating the integrated power system proposed in this work. 2.1. Solar thermal power system A solar thermal power system usually involves focussing sunlight on a small area to create a high temperature heat source. A thermal energy carrier is often used to transport the heat and pass the heat to the working uid via a heat exchange system. Table 1 shows a list of frequently-used high temperature thermal energy carriers [7,23], which are either pure or mixtures of different thermal uids. Fig. 1 shows a schematic diagram of the solar thermal power system. The system uses water as the working uid running on a Rankine cycle and there have been practical applications of the system [9]. The system works in the following way: rst solar radiation is concentrated by the parabolic trough or other types of collectors to heat the thermal energy carrier. The high temperature energy carrier super-heats the high pressure water in heat exchanger 1 (HX1) before entering the high pressure steam turbine (HP). Part of the steam extracted from the HP at an intermediate pressure is reheated by the high temperature energy carrier in heater exchanger (HX2) and then sent to the low pressure

steam turbine (LP) for further expansion. The exhaust steam is condensed in the condenser (CD) and then pumped to the regenerator (RG) where it mixes with the outlet steam of the HP. Finally, the condensed steam is pumped to high pressure to complete the closed power cycle. In such a manner the solar thermal energy is used in two levels and the cooled energy carrier is stored in MC and LC respectively. The thermal efciency of a solar collector is given as [24]:

hI;collector fT g

dQ dE
4 sTc

asF aeF

C S Eb

erF

sT 4
C S Eb

UL F

T T0 C S Eb

(1)

where Q is usable process heat and E is the total irradiance of the collector, as aasc/[1 rc(1 aa)] and aa is the absorptivity of the absorber, sc is the transmissivity of the cover, and rc is the fraction backscattered by the cover, ae aaea/[1 rc(1 aa)] and ec is the emissivity of the cover, er ea 1 rc =1 rc 1 aa and ea is the emissivity of the absorber, s is the StefaneBoltzmann constant, 5.67 108W/(m2$K4), r is the average reectivity, UL is the heat loss coefcient, F is termed as the n factor which is close to 1 for a well designed receiver or collector, T is the uid temperature, Tc is the cover temperature, T0 is the ambient temperature, C is the concentration ratio, S Eb is the direct radiation, S Eb S E S Ed with S E the diffusion radiation and S E the global irradiance, S E f sT 4 d s with f being the dilution factor which can be assumed to be wavelength independent. In case of concentrated radiation the diffuse solar part in the incident global radiation can be omitted, one has S Eb S E. Integrating Equation (1) from State 1 to State 2, the total irradiance of the collector can be obtained as:

ZT2 E
T1

hI;collector fT g

dQ

(2)

The exergy released by the solar irradiance [24]:

  4 T0 Exsolar zE 1 1 0:28ln f 3 TS
For a constant specic _ cp m _ dT , then dQ dcp mT heat thermal

(3)
uid

ZT2 Q
T1

_ T2 T1 dQ cp m

(4)

The exergy transferred to the solar heat carrier is then given as [9]:

& ExQ Q 1

T0 T ln 2 T2 T1 T1

!' (5)

As a consequence, one has the exergetic efciency of the collector as follows:

Table 1 Frequently-used liquid materials for the storage of high temperature sensible heat. Material Draw salt (50% KNO3 50% NaNO3 by weight) Molten salt (53% KNO3 40% NaNO2 7% NaNO3 by weight) Liquid sodium Thermal-oil 66
a

Temperature range (K) 493e813 419e813 373e1033 263e616

Densitya (kg/m3) 1733 1680 750 750

Specic heat (J/kg$K) 1550 1560 1260 2100

Volumetric heat capacity (kJ/m3$K) 2686 2620 945 1575

Average density and specic heat in the temperature range given.

78

Y. Li et al. / Renewable Energy 37 (2012) 76e81

Fig. 1. Conguration of a solar thermal power system.

hII;collector

ExQ Exsolar

2.2. Cryogen fuelled power system If ambient heat is the only source available, a direct expansion cycle is the simplest and most applicable way to extract the cryogenic energy in a cryogen fuelled power system [10]. Fig. 2 shows such a system with a two-stage direct expansion process. The cryogen stored in the storage tank (CT) is rst pumped to a high pressure by a cryogenic pump (CP) and then heated gradually in the heat exchanger (HX) and the room heater (RH1) before subject the two-stage expansion process to the high pressure (HP) and low pressure (LP) turbines with inter-heating (RH2). The high grade cold discharged in HX may be recovered for a direct use such as air liquefaction, ethylene separation, liquid CO2 production, refrigerated warehouses, freezing of food etc or even to drive a secondary cycle for further power generation. The mathematical formulae for evaluating the thermodynamic performance of the components in this system are similar to those used in the solar thermal power system and will not be repeated here. 2.3. Solar-cryogen hybrid power system The hybrid system proposed in this work integrates the solar thermal power cycle and the cryogen fuelled power cycle and the cryogen itself is used as the common working uid. Fig. 3 illustrates such a system. One can see that the hybrid system consists of three parts: an open cycle of cryogen direct expansion, a closed Brayton cycle for full extraction of cryogenic energy and a solar energy

! T0 T 1 ln 2 T2 T1 T1   ZT2 1 1 4 T0 1 0:28ln f dT 1 hI;collector fT g T2 T1 3 TS

T1

(6)
The thermodynamic performances of other components of the systems are calculated in the following way. Dening the specic exergy at State i as:

ji hi h0 T0 si s0

(7)

where h is enthalpy, s is entropy and the subscript zero indicates properties at the reference state of pressure P0 and temperature T0. The power consumption of the pump is then calculated by:

_ joutlet jinlet =hpump Wpump m

The power output of turbine is:

(8)

_ jinlet joutlet hturbine Wturbine m

(9)

where hpump and hturbine are the efciencies of pump and turbine respectively.

Fig. 2. Conguration of a cryogen fuelled power system.

Y. Li et al. / Renewable Energy 37 (2012) 76e81

79

Fig. 3. Conguration of a cryogen-solar hybrid power system.

collection and storage unit to capture the solar energy and provide the heating source for both the cycles. In this system the closed Brayton cycle shares the intermediate pressure (IP) and low pressure (LP) turbines with direct expansion cycle to simplify the conguration while the cryogen is also used as the working uid of the Brayton cycle. The cold energy released by the cryogen direct expansion is recycled by the Brayton cycle through a heat transfer process in HX1. Similarly to the solar thermal power system, the solar thermal energy (the heat source) is extracted at two levels: the superheating process between State 14 and State 16 corresponding respectively to the high temperature and low temperature carriers and the inter-heating process between State 14 and State 15 corresponding respectively to the high temperature and intermediate temperature carriers. Comparing with the solar thermal power system, an additional compressor is added in the hybrid system. The power consumed by the additional compressor is given by:

_ joutlet jinlet =hcompressor Wcompressor m

where hcompressor is the compressor efciency.

(10)

the net power output (equal to the turbine output power subtracting the power consumed by compression and pumping processes) and Wliquefaction is the power consumed by the cryogen production process. Liquid nitrogen is taken as an example of the working cryogen in the parametric optimisation and the solar energy carrier is assumed to have a constant specic heat. Other data used in the simulations are summarized in Table 2 [9,24e26]. The overall optimal performance of the three systems is given in Table 3. From the table, one can see that the exergy efciency of the hybrid power system is much higher than the solar thermal and cryogen fuelled power systems e given the same energy source the net output power of the hybrid power system is 1.0118 MW, almost 31% higher than the summation of output power of both the solar thermal and cryogen fuelled power systems. The performance improvement of the hybrid power system comes from more efcient heat transfer processes. This can be demonstrated by the exergy analysis of the energy conservation processes using a graphical representation method named energy utilisation diagram (EUD). In the EUD method an intensive parameter called availability factor or energy level (A) is introduced

3. Parametric optimisation and system analysis Based on the power systems detailed in Section 2, parametric optimisation is carried out using a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method. The following exergy efciencies are selected as the objective functions for the optimisation:
Table 2 Main assumptions for the parametric optimisation. Solar collector Absorption term coefcient (as)F Emission term coefcient (ae)F Absorber loss term coefcient erF Convection heat loss coefcient ULF/Wm2K1 Cover temperature Tc/K The concentration ratio C Cryogenic pump isentropic efciency hpump Turbine isentropic efciency hturbine Compressor isentropic efciency hcompressor Approach temperature of heat exchanger system DT/K The wet vapour quality of steam turbine The effective solar temperature Ts/K The dilution factor f Ambient temperature T0/K Ambient pressure P0/Pa Power consumption of liquid nitrogen production Wliquefaction/(kWh/kg) _ cryogen =kg=s The mass ow of liquid nitrogen m

hsolar

Wnet Exsolar Wnet Wliquefaction

(11)

hcryogen hhybrid

(12)

Wnet Exsolar Wliquefaction

(13)

where hsolar, hcryogen and hhybrid are respectively the exergy efciencies of the solar thermal power system, the cryogen fuelled power system and the solar-cryogen hybrid power system, Wnet is

0.8 0.8 0.8 20 300 40 0.75 0.90 0.87 10 >0.9 5777 1.3 105 298.15 1.01325 105 0.5 1.0

80 Table 3 Overall optimal performances of the three systems.

Y. Li et al. / Renewable Energy 37 (2012) 76e81

Solar thermal power system Exergy efciency (%) Energy Source Solar radiation (MW) Liquid nitrogen (kg/s) Net output power (MW) 23.89 2.628 0 0.4485

Cryogen fueled power system 18.10 0 1.0 0.3259

Solar-cryogen hybrid power system 27.55 2.628 1.0 1.0118

Fig. 4. EUD representation of the optimised hybrid power system.

as an indicator of the potential of the energy donated and accepted by the processes [27]:

Dj Dh

(14)

a consequence, supercritical cycles are much easily to achieve using the cryogen. Listed in Table 4 also includes the critical properties of methane, which, as will be discussed in the following section in terms of applications, also gives much better performance than the use of steam as the working uid. 4. Further discussion on the hybrid system In this section, further discussion will be on (i) selection of thermal energy carrier, (ii) optimal thermal carrier temperature provided by solar heat, (iii) possible commercial position of the hybrid system. 4.1. Selection of thermal energy carrier The state parameters of the optimised hybrid system are listed in Table 5, which shows the highest working temperature is about 600 K. This, according to Table 1, suggests Thermal-oil 66 could be used as the heat carrier uid and the mass ow rate data in Table 5 are produced according to the properties of this uid. The data in Table 5 also shows that the mass ow rate of heat carrier is 3.6 times that of liquid nitrogen, which should be practically possible. In addition, under the conditions of the hybrid power system, the Thermal-oil 66 has an energy density of about 447 kJ/kg, which is

Dening a process that releases energy as an energy donor (ED) and a process that receives energy as an energy acceptor (EA), the exergy loss of the processes can then be given by:

EXL

Dji

Dhi Aed;i Aea;i

Z Aed Aea dh (15)

By plotting the availability factor of the energy donating and accepting processes against the transferred energy, the amount of exergy loss in the system can be obtained as the area between the two curves. Fig. 4 shows the EUD representations of the hybrid power systems. One can see the exergy loss in the heat exchangers of the hybrid power system is signicantly lower than that in the power transfer components such as turbines and compressor. There are two reasons for this. First, the use of the Brayton cycle in the hybrid system enables a much more efcient heat transfer to recover the high grade cold energy due to better temperature glide matching between heat addition and heat rejection. Second, the outlet temperature of the expanded gas is increased as the compressed gas is superheated by the solar thermal energy prior to entering the turbines. Therefore the exergy loss in the exhaust gas is reduced. Meanwhile, the use of cryogen as the working uid is benecial for the solar thermal energy utilisation. This can be understood from Table 4, which shows that the critical temperatures and pressures of nitrogen are much lower than that of the steam. As

Table 4 Critical temperature and pressure for water, nitrogen and methane. Water/Steam Critical temperature (K) Critical pressure (MPa) 647 22.06 Nitrogen 126 3.39 Methane 190 4.60

Y. Li et al. / Renewable Energy 37 (2012) 76e81 Table 5 State parameters of the optimal hybrid system. State Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Mass ow rate (kg/s) 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0 2.8 2.8 1.0 1.8 1.8 1.8 1.8 3.6 2.1 1.5 Pressure (Pa) 1.0 1.5 1.5 1.5 3.9 3.9 1.3 1.3 1.0 1.0 1.0 3.9 3.9 e e e 105 107 107 107 106 106 106 106 105 105 105 106 106 Temperature (K) 77.4 84.0 275.7 593.9 406.8 593.9 441.1 593.9 298.2 298.2 94.0 294.4 593.9 603.9 451.1 304.4

81

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the following agents for nancially supporting the work: (i) UK EPSRC for a Dorothy Hodgkin Award, (ii) UK EPSRC for a Grant under EP/F060955/1, and (iii) Institute of Process Engineering of Chinese Academy of Sciences under a collaborative energy research initiative.

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even higher than the latent heat of most high temperature phase change materials [10]. These make the Thermal-oil 66 a competitive thermal energy storage medium for this type of applications. Of course it is recognised, the Thermal-oil 66 has a lower thermal conductivity, which could be enhanced by using the concept of nanouids. 4.2. Optimal thermal carrier temperature provided by solar heat The optimisation also indicates that the optimal temperature of the heat carrier heated by the solar collectors for the hybrid system is about 600 K. This requirement is easily achievable as most of the concentrated solar power plants give a temperature up to 600e700 K [28]. 4.3. Potential commercial aspects of the hybrid power system The proposed hybrid system is best suited to locations with (i) cryogen such as LNG and (ii) sunshine. There are a number of places satisfy these criteria, including for example, large-scale LNG importing ports in Japan and Southeast coast of China. However, the new system requires a high pressure gas turbine with 15 MPa inlet pressure according to the optimisation analyses, which, to our knowledge, cannot be found in commercial market. This is not necessarily a technological challenge in our view as this working pressure is lower than currently available steam turbines and the working temperature is much lower than that of combustion based gas turbines. Another key factor that affects commercial uptake of the hybrid system is economics. Although this is beyond the scope of this work, we expect that capital and running costs for the hybrid power system should be signicantly lower than that needed for a solar thermal power system and a cryogen fuelled power system. Bear in mind, the hybrid system provides w30% more power thans the summation of the two systems. It is therefore reasonably optimistic about the commercial future of the proposed hybrid system. 5. Conclusions A new solar-cryogen hybrid power system is proposed and is compared with a solar thermal power system and a cryogen fuelled power system. Thermodynamic analyses and optimisation are carried on these systems. The results show that the hybrid system provides over 30% more power than the summation of the power outputs of the other two systems. The results also suggest the optimal hot end temperature of the heat carrier heated by the solar collectors be about 600 K for the hybrid system.