Performance investigation of transcritical carbon dioxide two-stage compression cycle with expander

The trend toward the energy efficiency improvement for transcritical carbon dioxide refrigeration cycles has led to the development of the two-stage compression process. Three different variations of transcritical carbon dioxide two-stage compression cycles with expanders are investigated by using thermodynamics analysis. They are the two-stage compression at optimal intermediate pressure (TCOP) cycle, two-stage compression with expander driving high-pressure stage (TCDH) cycle and two-stage compression with expander driving low-pressure stage (TCDL) cycle, respectively. The performance of the TCOP cycle and the single-stage compression with expander (SCE) cycle is mainly discussed and compared for a wide operating condition. It is found that the COP and exergy efficiency of the TCOP cycle are on average 9% higher than those of the SCE cycle. At given design points, the COP of the TCDH cycle outperforms the other options, showing 11.32%, 9.65% and 0.72% performance improvement over the TCDL cycle, SCE cycle and the TCOP cycle, respectively. If design and structure are also taken into account, the TCDH cycle is a feasible option since the expander and the auxiliary compressor are integrated into one unit; thus, the transfer loss and leakage loss can be decreased greatly. The key problem is to adopt some measures that control the operating conditions to avoid deviating from the design point.