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 Chapter 8

Organic
Organic Rankine
Rankine Cycle
Cycle for
for Recovery
Recovery of
of Liquefied
Liquefied
Natural
Natural Gas
Gas (LNG)
(LNG) Cold
Cold Energy
Energy

Junjiang Bao

Additional
Additional information is available
information is available at
at the
the end
end of
of the
the chapter
chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

Abstract
Natural gas (NG) is an environment-friendly energy source. NG is of gas state in the
environmental condition and it is liquefied to LNG at temperature of about −162°C for
transportation and storage. Electric energy of 292–958 kWh is consumed when one ton of
LNG is produced. Before being used, LNG must be regasified to NG again at the receiv-
ing site, and this process will release a great deal of energy, which is called cold energy.
It’s very important to recovery LNG cold energy, which is clean and of high quality.
Power generation is a conventional and effective way to utilize LNG cold energy. For
the low efficiency of the traditional power generation system with liquefied natural gas
(LNG) cold energy utilization, by improving the heat transfer characteristic between the
working fluid and LNG, this chapter has proposed a conception of multi-stage condensa-
tion Rankine cycle system. Furthermore, the performance of power generation systems
will be enhanced with two aspects: improvement of system configuration and optimiza-
tion of working fluids.

Keywords: organic Rankine cycle, LNG cold energy, two-stage condensation Rankine
cycle, zeotropic mixture, system configuration

1. Introduction

Energy shortage and environmental pollution are two major themes in today’s world [1].
More and more attentions are paid to Natural gas (NG) because it is clean and has high calo-
rific value [2, 3], and it is widely consumed all over the world [4]. NG is of gas state in the
environmental condition and it is liquefied to LNG at temperature of about −162°C for trans-
portation and storage [5]. Electric energy of 292–958 kWh is consumed when one ton of LNG

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
© 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
150 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

is produced [6]. Before being used, LNG must be regasified to NG again at the receiving site,
and this process will release a great deal of energy, which is called cold energy [7]. It is very
important to recovery LNG cold energy which is clean and of high quality. Usually LNG is
heated by sea water or air, so that LNG cold energy is wasted and the sea near the regasifica-
tion site also is affected [8]. Therefore, the recovery of the LNG cold energy a dual purpose [8].
One of effective ways to utilize LNG cold energy is power generation [9]. The traditional
cycles include direct expansion cycle (DE), organic Rankine cycle (ORC) and combined cycle
(CC) [10]. Although the simplicity for direct expansion cycle, it has limited applications with
low efficiency and high operation pressure. Organic Rankine cycle and combined cycle are
more popular and relatively mature. Osaka Gas Company in Japan built ORC and CC system
using propane in 1979 and 1982, and the power output reached 1450 and 6000 kW, respec-
tively [11]. Due to the importance of system parameters on the performance of power genera-
tion system, many researches are carried out. With seawater as heat source and LNG as heat
sink, Kim et al. [12] found that there is an optimum condenser outlet temperature for ORC
system. Heat source inlet temperature, evaporation pressure and condensation temperature
are studied by Wang et al. [13] to achieve high exergy efficiency of ORC recovering LNG cold
energy. With the heat integration of LNG at vaporization pressure of 70 bar, Koku et al. [14]
obtained a thermal efficiency of 6% for the combined cycle with propane as working fluid.

Improvement of system structure and proper working fluid selection are two effective way to
enhance the system performance. For system structure, the combinations of simple Rankine
cycle in series or parallel is often considered by Zhang et al. [7] and García et al. [15] and
they found that they were indeed more efficient. Cascaded Rankine cycles are also common
improvement and are proved to be superior to simple Rankine cycles by Li et al. [16], Choi
et al. [17], Cao et al. [18], and Wang et al. [19]. By combining the Rankine cycle and refrigera-
tion cycle, the study of Zhang et al. [20] showed that both electricity and refrigeration can be
produced simultaneously. Mosaffa et al. [21] compared four different cycles, and pointed out
that different system structure is best when the objective function changes.
Selection of working fluids is also critical for the performance and economy of system except
for cycle structure. By using eight kinds of working fluids, Zhang et al. [7] found n-pentane
has the best system performance. A comparative study by Sung et al. [22] showed that R123
were the optimal working fluids for a dual-loop cycle with LNG cold energy as heat sink.
Considering ethane, ethene, carbon dioxide, R134a, R143a and propene, Ferreira et al. [23]
concluded that ethene and ethane had higher system efficiency. Zeotropic mixtures are also
considered in power generation system for recovery of LNG cold energy. Ammonia-water
mixture is used by Wang et al. [24], and they found there was an optimal mass fraction at
which work output was largest. With R601-R23-R14 ternary mixture as the working fluid, Lee
et al. [25] found that the exergy loss of ORC using mixture is lower than that of pure fluids.
Kim et al. [26] selected R14-propane mixture as the working fluids for the first stage of a
cascaded system and ethane-n-pentane mixture for the other two stages. Modi and Haglind
[27] thought that zeotropic mixture is the development direction of working fluids with its
higher thermodynamic performance.
 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 151
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

In this chapter, the performance of power generation systems by LNG cold energy will be
enhanced with two aspects: improvement of system configuration and optimization of work-
ing fluids. Firstly, the two-stage condensation Rankine cycle is introduced. Based on this,
the effect of stage number of condensation process is discussed. Then, the influence of the
arrangements for compression process and expansion process is studied. Regarding to the
optimization of working fluids, pure working fluids are firstly compared, and then zeotropic
mixtures are optimized. Finally, a simultaneous approach to optimize the component and
composition of zeotropic mixture is put forward.

2. Improvement of system configuration

2.1. Two-stage condensation Rankine cycle (TCRC)

As shown in Figure 1, the TCRC system consists of an evaporator, two turbines, two condens-
ers, a mixer, a splitter and two feed pumps. After heated in the evaporator by sea water,
working fluid is evaporated to vapor and is divided into two streams in the splitter. The two
streams flow into different turbines respectively and are expanded to two different condensa-
tion pressures. These two streams transferred heat energy to LNG in two different condensers
and cooled to liquid. The two streams are pressurized by two different pumps and mixed in
the mixer. The converged stream enters the evaporator again and the new cycle recommences.
Except for absorbing the condensation heat from working fluids in two condensers, LNG is
further heated to the scheduled temperature in the reheater with sea water. T-s diagram of
the TCRC system is plotted in Figure 2, and the labeled state points in Figure 2 is the same as
that in Figure 1.

In order to determine whether the new proposed cycle has a better performance, the novel
system is compared with the conventional methods under the same conditions.

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the TCRC system.

152 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

Figure 2. T-s diagram of the TCRC system.

Net power output, thermal efficiency and exergy efficiency of TCRC system is compared with
the traditional cycles (DEC, ORC and CC), as shown in Figure 3. It should be pointed out
that four systems all used propane as working fluid. From Figure 3, it can be found that the
performance of proposed system is remarkably superior to the traditional power generation
cycles. Combined cycle has the highest net power output, thermal efficiency and exergy effi-
ciency among the traditional systems. However, compared with CC system, TCRC system
has a 45.27%, 42.91% and 52.31% increase respectively, in term of net power output, thermal
efficiency and exergy efficiency.
In order to explain the reason why TCRC system could have a better performance than the
traditional cycle, the heat transfer curves between working fluid and LNG of ORC and TCRC
systems are plotted in Figure 4. It can be seen from Figure 4 that heat transfer irreversibility of
ORC system is larger than that of TCRC system. The main reason is that compared with ORC
system, the condensation process of TCRC system is two-stage, which could lower the heat
transfer irreversibility of the condenser.

Figure 3. System performance of the four power generation methods: (a) net power output, (b) thermal efficiency, and
(c) exergy efficiency.
 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 153
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Figure 4. Heat transfer characteristics between working fluid and LNG: (a) ORC and (b) TCRC.

2.2. Effects of stage number of condensation process

In the previous section, it has been proved that two-stage condensation process has the poten-
tial to improve the performance of power generation systems by LNG cold energy. If the
number of condensation stage is increased, the performance of power generation systems
should be better at the cost of greater initial investment with more equipment. How many
stages of condensation process should be chosen?

Figure 5 shows the schematic of six different cycles from single-stage to three-stage condensa-
tion Rankine cycle with or without direction expansion. To take a comparison object, direc-
tion expansion cycle (DC) is also considered.

Figure 5. Schematic of single-stage, two-stage and three-stage condensation Rankine cycles with or without direction
expansion.
154 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

Net power output of system:

Wnet = ∑ Wtur,j − ∑ Wp,l (1)

The electricity production cost (EPC) can be expressed as:

3600 Ctotal
EPC = _______
W
(2)
net

The annual total net income (ATNI) of the system can be defined as:

ATNI = 7300(EP − EPC) Wnet (3)

where EP is electricity price.

From Figure 6 it can be seen that the net power output of the 3CC is the largest and the DE
is the least at any LNG vaporization pressure. When stage number of condensation process
increases, the net power output of Rankine cycles and combined cycles both increases. The
performance of combined cycles is better than that of Rankine cycles at the same stage num-
ber of condensation process.
Figure 7 shows the minimum EPC of seven different cycles at different LNG vaporization
pressures. The EPC of the Rankine cycle is larger than that of the combined system at the same
stage number of condensation process. The EPC of combined cycle is the least at the LNG
vaporization pressure less than 30 bar. With the increase of the stage number of condensation
process, EPC of combined cycles and Rankine cycles augments, but its increase rate decreases.
When the LNG vaporization pressure increases, the difference of EPC between combined
cycles and Rankine cycles at the same stage number of condensation process tends to zero.

Figure 6. The maximum net power output at different LNG vaporization pressures.
 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 155
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

Figure 7. The minimum EPC of seven systems at different LNG vapor pressures.

The electricity prices of literatures are different, such as 0.04, 0.061, 0.1, 0.123 and 0.18$/kWh
[28]. DC and CC systems should be selected at the LNG vaporization pressure less than 30 bar
if the electricity price is 0.04$/kWh. No system is profitable at the LNG vaporization pressure
of 70 bar. The CC systems are suitable at all the LNG vaporization pressure when the electric-
ity price is 0.061$/kWh. At the LNG vaporization pressure less than 30 bar, it should be con-
sidered DE system. Seven cycles could be profitable if electricity price is larger than 0.1$/kWh.

The capacity of power generation can be weight by net power output, and whether cycle is
profitable could evaluated by EPC. But the maximum profitability of the system is deter-
mined by both the net power output and EPC, which be reflected by annual net income. The
electricity price of 0.123 $/kWh is taken as the referenced electricity price. It can be seen from
Figure 8 that the annual net income of the 3CC system is largest, while the least is the DC
cycle. The annual net income of the Rankine cycles is lower than that of the combined cycles
at the same stage number of the condensation process. When the stage number of the conden-
sation process increases, both the annual net income of the Rankine cycle and the combined
cycle systems goes up, but their increase rates decrease.

2.3. Influence of the arrangements for compression process and expansion process

In the field of utilizing LNG cold energy by ORC (organic Rankine cycle), most studies focus
on how to reduce the irreversible loss of the heat exchange process but pay little attention to the
arrangements for compression and expansion process. The compression and expansion pro-
cess, as the parts of the cycle that consumes and products energy, affect the cycle performance
as well due to that their different arrangements make the efficiency of the component different.

The structures of four different two-stage condensation Rankine cycles are shown in
Figure 9. There are two types of arrangements for the pumps in the compression process.
156 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

Figure 8. The maximized annual net income of seven cycles at different LNG vapor pressures.

Figure 9. The configurations of four different two-stage condensation Rankine cycles.

The arrangement a shown in Figure 9 is called parallel compression arrangement. The other
arrangement b shown in Figure 9 is called series compression arrangement. Similarly, there
are also two types of arrangements for the turbines in the expansion process. The arrange-
ment c shown in Figure 9 is called parallel expansion arrangement. The arrangement d shown
in Figure 9 is called series expansion arrangement.

This paper takes 80% as the reference efficiency when the turbine efficiency is constant. When
the turbine efficiency is non-constant, this paper adopted the turbine efficiency prediction
model with the turbine size parameter (SP) and the specific volume (Vr) as the input param-
eters, as is shown in Eq. (4).
 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 157
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

15
ηturb,is = n=0
Σ Fn An (4)

where Fn is input parameter SP and Vr, and An is the regression coefficients, which could be
found in Ref. [29].
In order to study the arrangements of the pumps, cycle 1 is compared with cycle 3 with
constant turbine efficiency and same arrangements of the turbines, as shown in Figure 10a.
Although the condensation temperatures vary within a range, cycle 1 performs almost the
same as Cycle 3, which indicating that the impact of the arrangements of the pumps on the
system performance is little. The reason is that the consumed power of WF-pump 1 and
WF-pump 2 is small (< 0.05 kW), which has a very little effect on the net power output.
To investigate the arrangements of the turbines, Cycle 1 is compared with Cycle 2, as shown
in in Figure 10b. It can be seen that the net output power of Cycle 2 is always a little higher
than that of Cycle 1 at different condensation temperatures, which suggests that the series
compress arrangement performs better than the parallel.
Net power output of cycle 1 is compared with cycle 2 and cycle 3 with non-constant turbine
efficiency, as shown in Figure 11. It could be found that the impact of the arrangements for

Figure 10. The comparison of the net power output between (a) cycle 1 and cycle 3, (b) cycle 1 and cycle 2 under the
constant turbine efficiency.

Figure 11. The comparison of the net power output between (a) cycle 1 and cycle 3, (b) cycle 1 and cycle 2 under non-
constant efficiency.
158 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

pumps on the system performance is little but the influence of the arrangements for turbine is
great. The series arrangement for turbines has a greater impact on the system performance than
the parallel arrangement. Meanwhile, this impact for non-constant turbine efficiency is much
more pronounced than that for constant turbine efficiency, with comparing Figures 10 and 11.

3. Optimization of working fluids

3.1. Pure working fluids

For power generation systems using LNG cold energy, the choice of working fluid has a
great influence on the performance of the system. Due to the low temperature of the LNG,
it is necessary to consider several aspects when selecting working fluid. Based on the previ-
ous study, this paper selects 11 kinds of working fluids, including hydrocarbons (HCs) and
hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and the physical properties of them are shown in Table 1.

The evaporation temperature, the condensation temperatures and the inlet pressure of NG
turbine of the two-stage condensation combined cycle are optimized with the net power out-
put as objective function. T The maximum net power output and the critical temperatures of
the 11 different pure working fluids are shown in Figure 12.

It can be seen from Figure 12 that the net power output of the two-stage condensation com-
bined cycle is the largest when n-C5H12 is chosen as working fluid, and the net power output
of C2F6 is the least. From the trend lines of the net power output and the critical tempera-
ture for 11 kinds of working fluids, it can be found that the variation trend of the net power

Working fluids Chemical formula Critical temperature (°C) Critical pressure Normal boiling point (°C)
(bar)
R170 C2H6 32.17 48.72 −88.82

R1270 C3H6 91.06 45.55 −47.62

R290 C3H8 96.74 42.51 −42.11

— i-C4H8 144.94 40.09 −7.00

R600 n-C4H10 151.98 37.96 −0.49

R601 n-C5H12 196.55 33.70 36.06

R23 CHF3 26.14 48.32 −82.09

R134a C2H2F4 101.06 40.59 −26.07

R125 C2HF5 66.02 36.18 −48.09

R116 C2F6 19.88 30.48 −78.09

R218 C3F8 71.87 26.40 −36.79

Table 1. Physical properties of selected pure working fluids.

 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 159
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

output is approximately the same as that of the critical temperature of working fluids. With
the increase of the critical temperature, the net power output of the system increases roughly.

3.2. Mixed working fluids

In this section, 11 pure working fluids are combined to binary mixtures. With the net power
output as the objective function, evaporation temperature, condensation temperatures, the
inlet pressure of the NG turbine and the molar fraction of binary working fluids are opti-
mized. When the net power output of the system is maximum, the optimized results of differ-
ent binary mixtures are shown in Figure 13.

The gray dotted line in Figure 13b represents the trend line of net power output of 11 pure
working fluids, and the black dotted line represents the trend line of maximum net power
output in each column. From Figure b, it can be found that the optimal net power output for
pure fluids changes from 2158.49 to 2712.41 kW. While the optimal net power output for mix-
tures distributes between 2894.47 and 3107.91 kW, which has an obvious increase than that
for pure fluids and the variation range for mixtures is much smaller than that of pure fluids.
Figure 14 shows the maximum net power output of the two-stage condensation combined
cycle when the component numbers of working fluids change from one to five. When the
component number of mixed working fluid is five, it is actually quaternary mixture due to the
results of optimization. As shown in Figure 14, with the increase of the component number
of mixed working fluid, the net power output of the two-stage condensation combined cycle
is increased, but the increase rate is gradually reduced. When the component numbers of
the mixed working fluid are three and four, the net power output of the system is almost the

Figure 12. The maximum net power output and the critical temperature for different working fluids.
160 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

same. With the increase of the component number of mixture, the difficulty of charging work-
ing fluids into system becomes significant. Therefore, considering the increase rate of the net
power output and the difficulty of charging working fluids, the optimum component number
of hydrocarbon mixtures is three for the two-stage condensation combined cycle.

Figure 13. The maximum net power output of different pure working fluids and binary mixtures: (a) 3-D histogram and
(b) 2-D diagram.
 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 161
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

Figure 14. The net power output of the system corresponding to the mixtures with different component numbers.

3.3. A simultaneous approach to optimize the component and composition of

zeotropic mixture

The traditional method of determining the components and compositions of mixtures is firstly
to predefine some fluids, and then, according to the number of components, these fluids are
chosen and combined as the component of mixed working fluids one by one. At last, the com-
positions of the formed mixtures and the corresponding system parameters are optimized
at the specified system structure respectively. It is difficult to optimize the components of a

Figure 15. Basic idea for simultaneous approach to optimize component and composition of zeotropic mixture.
162 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

mixture, because the components of the mixed working fluids are independent of each other
and discrete, and meanwhile it is difficult to describe them with mathematical variables. In
order to reduce the intensity of calculation for components and compositions of zeotropic
mixtures and achieve the simultaneous optimization of components and compositions for
zeotropic mixtures, a selective coefficient ai is introduced, as shown in Figure 15. Because
the components of mixture are discrete, only discrete variables can be used to describe them.
Each component of mixture is expressed by a selective coefficient. The selective coefficient ai
is a binary variable, and it has two values 0 or 1. When the value of selective coefficient ai is 1,
the component expressed by this selective coefficient is selected. While the value of selective

Control variables Range Results of Optimal results of Optimal results of

pure fluid binary mixture ternary mixture
Ethane selective coefficient a1 {0,1} 0 0 0

Ethylene selective coefficient a2 {0,1} 0 0 0

Propylene selective coefficient a3 {0,1} 0 0 1

Propane selective coefficient a4 {0,1} 0 0 0

Butane selective coefficient a5 {0,1} 0 0 0

Isobutane selective coefficient a6 {0,1} 0 1 1

Pentane selective coefficient a7 {0,1} 1 1 1

R23 selective coefficient a8 {0,1} 0 0 0

R32 selective coefficient a9 {0,1} 0 0 0

R41 selective coefficient a10 {0,1} 0 0 0

R116 selective coefficient a11 {0,1} 0 0 0

Ethane mole fraction x1 [0,1] 0.441 0.485 0.598

Ethylene mole fraction x2 [0,1] 0.162 0.488 0.254

Propylene mole fraction x3 [0,1] 0.399 0.527 0.492

Propane mole fraction x4 [0,1] 0.211 0.410 0.852

Butane mole fraction x5 [0,1] 0.752 0.539 0.570

Isobutane mole fraction x6 [0,1] 0.825 0.836 0.319

Pentane mole fraction x7 [0,1] 1 0.164 0.189

R23 mole fraction x8 [0,1] 0.622 0.734 0.494

R32 mole fraction x9 [0,1] 0.300 0.390 0.351

R41 mole fraction x10 [0,1] 0.705 0.503 0.188

R116 mole fraction x11 [0,1] 0.583 0.304 0.452

Evaporation temperature x12 (°C) [5,10] 6.3 10.0 10.0

First-stage condensation temperature [−140, −90] −100.0 −113.9 −129.7

x13 (°C)

Second-stage condensation [−80, −40] −42.9 −56.2 −71.2

temperature x14 (°C)

Table 2. The range of control variables and their optimal results in case 2.
 Organic Rankine Cycle for Recovery of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Cold Energy 163
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.77990

coefficient ai is 0, it means this component is not selected. The sum of the selective coefficient
ai is used to control the number of component for mixture. For example, binary mixture can be
optimized by Σai = 2. While the composition xi of each component is the continuous variable
and its value is between 0 and 1. There are no constraint conditions for composition xi, but the
total sum of compositions for all the selected components should be 1, i.e., Σaixi = 1.

Net power output is selected as the objective function, and the optimization variables include
the selective coefficients of components, operation parameters of system and compositions
of components. For the two-stage condensation Rankine cycle shown in Figure 1, the main
operation parameters are evaporation temperature, the first-stage condensation temperature
and the second-stage condensation temperature. The range of control variables and their opti-
mal results are shown in Table 2.
Table 2 shows that the best ternary mixture is propylene/isobutane/pentane (0.492/0.319/0.189,
by mole fraction), and the optimum binary mixture isobutane/pentane (0.836/0.164, by mole
fraction). Pure fluid pentane is best among pure fluids.

4. Conclusions

This chapter has proposed a conception of multi-stage condensation Rankine cycle (TCRC)
system. The performance of the power generation systems is enhanced by two aspects:
improvement of system configuration and optimization of working fluids. Compared with
the combined cycle, the net work output, thermal efficiency and exergy efficiency of the TCRC
system are respectively increased by 45.27, 42.91 and 52.31%. The two-stage condensation
Rankine cycle is more suitable from the viewpoint of economy. For the arrangements for
compression process and expansion process of TCRC, the arrangements for pumps have
little impact on the net output power and the series arrangement for turbines performs better
than the parallel arrangement. With the increase of the critical temperature for pure fluids,
the net power output of the system increases roughly. Zeotropic mixture can improve the
performance, and the optimum component number of hydrocarbon mixtures is three for the
two-stage condensation combined cycle. A simultaneous approach to optimize the compo-
nent and composition of zeotropic mixture is put forward which can reduce the consumed
calculation time greatly.

Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(No. 51606025).

Conflict of interest

The author declared that there is no conflict of interest.

164 Organic Rankine Cycle Technology for Heat Recovery

Author details

Junjiang Bao

Address all correspondence to: baojj@dlut.edu.cn

School of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Panjin,

China

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