The organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is a mature technology for the conversion of waste heat to electricity. Although many energy intensive industries could benefit significantly from the integration of ORC technology, its current adoption rate is limited. One important reason for this arises from the difficulty of prospective investors and end-users to recognize and, ultimately, realise the potential energy savings from such deployment. In recent years, electric arc furnaces (EAF) have been identified as particularly interesting candidates for the implementation of waste heat recovery projects. Therefore, in this work, the integration of an ORC system into a 100 MWe EAF is investigated. The effect of evaluations based on averaged heat profiles, a steam buffer and optimized ORC architectures is investigated. The results show that it is crucial to take into account the heat profile variations for the typical batch process of an EAF. An optimized subcritical ORC system is found capable of generating a net electrical output of 752 kWe with a steam buffer working at 25 bar. If combined heating is considered, the ORC system can be optimized to generate 521 kWe of electricity, while also delivering 4.52 MW of heat. Finally, an increased power output (by 26% with combined heating, and by 39% without combined heating) can be achieved by using high temperature thermal oil for buffering instead of a steam loop; however, the use of thermal oil in these applications has been until now typically discouraged due to flammability concerns.

Worldwide interest in low grade heat valorization using organic Rankine cycle (ORC) technologies has increased significantly. A new small-scale ORC with a net capacity of 3 kW was efficiently integrated with a concentrated solar power technology for electricity generation. The excess heat source from Photovoltaic (PV) collectors with a maximum temperature of 100 °C was utilized through a supercritical heat exchanger that uses R-404A as working medium. By ensuring supercritical heat transfer leads to a better thermal match in the heat exchanger and improved overall cycle efficiency. A helical coil heat exchanger was designed by using heat transfer correlations from the literature. These heat transfer correlations were derived for different conditions than ORCs and their estimated uncertainty is ~20%. In order to account for the heat transfer correlation uncertainties this component was oversized by 20%. Next, a prototype was built and installed in an integrated concentrated photovoltaic/thermal (CPV/T)/Rankine system. The results from the measurements show that for better estimation of the sizing of the heat exchanger a more accurate correlation is required in order to design an optimal configuration and thus employ cheaper components.

In this study, the performance of a helical coil heat exchanger operating at subcritical and supercritical conditions is analysed. The counter-current heat exchanger was specially designed to operate at a maximal pressure and temperature of 42 bar and 200 °C, respectively. The small-scale solar organic Rankine cycle (ORC) installation has a net power output of 3 kWe. The first tests were done in a laboratory where an electrical heater was used instead of the concentrated photovoltaic/thermal (CPV/T) collectors. The inlet heating fluid temperature of the water was 95 °C. The effects of different parameters on the heat transfer rate in the heat exchanger were investigated. Particularly, the performance analysis was elaborated considering the changes of the mass flow rate of the working fluid (R-404A) in the range of 0.20–0.33 kg/s and the inlet pressure varying from 18 bar up to 41 bar. Hence, the variation of the heat flux was in the range of 5–9 kW/m². The results show that the working fluid’s mass flow rate has significant influence on the heat transfer rate rather than the operational pressure. Furthermore, from the comparison between the experimental results with the heat transfer correlations from the literature, the experimental results fall within the uncertainty range for the supercritical analysis but there is a deviation of the investigated subcritical correlations.