| Abstract: | A significant fraction of the gaseous fuel supplied to industry will be used in medium- and small-size cogeneration plants. In this paper, a gas turbine and a gas engine of about 800 kW power output are compared at full and part load operation. When low-temperature heat (e.g., for space heating) is produced, the higher exhaust losses of the gas turbine yield a lower system efficiency, particularly at part load. A scheme is proposed to recover the exhaust gas energy by cooling to a temperature near ambient. The system features a heat pump to raise the recovered heat temperature to a usable level and an organic Rankine cycle (ORC) engine to drive the heat pump. The ORC engine uses the high-temperature fraction of the heat recovered from the exhaust. The data for the ORC engine are derived from an actual experimental engine. The performance is calculated for the system at full load. |
