A novel design methodology for waste heat recovery systems using organic Rankine cycle Denny Budisulistyo ⇑ , Susan Krumdieck University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand article info Article history: Received 17 January 2017 Received in revised form 11 March 2017 Accepted 13 March 2017 Keywords: Design methodology of organic Rankine cycle Waste heat recovery Design to resource method Cost-effective designs The closest match between design and heat source abstract This paper discusses a comprehensive design methodology for optimization of organic Rankine cycle designs using a new design to resource method. The objective of the design to resource method is to obtain the best designs, which are the closest match to the resource and the most cost-effective. The design analysis is constrained by the available main components and heat resource. The ratio of net power output to the total heat exchanger area is used as the objective function. The new design method- ology was implemented on an existing lab-scale as a case study. Experiments were conducted to obtain the data to identify the heat transfer coefficients of the real processes and validate the simulation model results. Design evaluations were carried out on the plant by using three Capstone gas turbine load con- ditions and four design alternatives. The results indicate that design 1 has the highest objective function of all the alternatives. It is able to increase the objective function from 100% to 391% of the base case depending on the Capstone gas turbine load conditions. The results also reveal that the current small scale plant is more suitable to Capstone gas turbine load condition 1 with the highest waste heat utiliza- tion rate of 76.9%. Ó 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction Industries ultimately discharge about 20–50% of their energy consumption as waste heat [1]. Thermal power generation plants necessarily release waste heat to the environment, but fuel utiliza- tion could be improved if the waste heat stream is sufficient to drive a bottoming cycle. The waste heat recovery using a bottoming organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is technologies especially in the field of heavy duty stationary engines and gas turbine power generators [2]. ORC energy conversion plants are commercially available for high temperature thermal resources. Successful companies like Ormat and Turboden possess a great deal of in-house knowledge based engineering gained from decades of experience. Utility-scale ORC’s also benefit from a well-developed supply chain for the stan- dard working fluids and systems components, in particular the tur- bomachinery. Waste heat resources are usually lower temperature and are rejecting heat to the environment as part of a required cool- ing operation. Thus, the engineering of waste heat recovery ORC’s will have challenging constraints on the system integration, thermo- dynamic cycle efficiency, available components, working fluids and the cost. The main aim of this research project is to use commercially available thermal systems modelling tools to develop a design inves- tigation methodology for a given low temperature resource with strict requirements on inlet and outlet temperature, and which con- siders all five key design variables where each has constrained avail- able operating conditions. Thermo-economic optimization of ORC waste heat recovery (WHR) systems has been approached in several different ways, but most find that there is a trade-off between thermodynamic efficiency and plant cost. Li and Dai [3] investigated the effect of recuperator and superheat degree for a range of zeotropic mix- tures. Imran et al. [4] analysed the choice of basic and regenerative thermodynamic cycles under a constant heat source condition to optimize the choice of working fluid. Hajabdollahi et al. [5] mod- elled and optimized a WHR ORC for a diesel engine to select a working fluid. Quoilin et al. [6] proposed a fluid selection based on thermo-economic considerations instead of a simple thermody- namic objective function to select the working fluid. There are five main design variables for an ORC preliminary design: 1. Working fluid (e.g. n-pentane, R245fa, or a zeotropic mixture) 2. Cycle configuration (e.g. basic cycle or including recuperator) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2017.03.047 0196-8904/Ó 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: dbu37@uclive.ac.nz (D. Budisulistyo), susan.krumdieck@ canterbury.ac.nz (S. Krumdieck). Energy Conversion and Management 142 (2017) 1–12 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy Conversion and Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enconman