Thermodynamic comparison of modified Rankine cycle configurations for LNG cold energy recovery under different working conditions

Highlights: • 5 Rankine cycles, 8 fluids, 4–7 parameters are optimized under different conditions. • Modified single-stage RCs are better than two-stage RCs. • Regenerative-reheat RC is the optimal configuration for most conditions. • The regenerator improves the thermal match for fluid with low critical temperature. • DEC improves efficiency for fluid with high NBPT under low pipeline pressure. In this study, we present the evaluation of two modified single-stage Rankine cycles (RC) and two two-stage RCs to provide a guidance for configuration selection under different working conditions. Moreover, a regenerative-reheat RC, which is the combination of the modified single-stage RCs, is proposed to utilize the cold energy of liquefied natural gas (LNG) and the thermal energy of low grade heat. The key parameters of these five configurations using eight working fluids are optimized with exergy efficiency as the optimization objective. The results show that the modified single-stage RCs are usually better than the two-stage RCs since they have simpler configurations with similar or higher efficiencies. The regenerative-reheat RC performs even better under most working conditions and it achieves the maximum efficiency of 24.57% by using ethane as the working fluid under the heat source temperature of 180 °C and the pipeline pressure of 3 MPa. The addition of direct expansion cycle can improve the exergy efficiencies of most fluids and configurations under lower pipeline pressures. However, the improvements decrease greatly for fluids with low normal boiling point temperatures (NBPTs) and especially under higher pipeline pressures. As to the fluid selection, high critical temperature and low NBPT are both important for reheat RC and parallel two-stage RC. NBPT weights more than critical temperature for regenerative RC and regenerative-reheat RC. Besides, wet working fluids are more suitable for reheat RC while dry and isentropic fluids are more suitable for regenerative RC and regenerative-reheat RC. The optimal regenerative ratio and reheat pressure ratio vary with different working fluids and working conditions. Lower reheat pressure ratio usually leads to higher regenerative ratio.