Off-design performance analysis of supercritical CO2 mixture Brayton cycle with floating critical points

Abstract

The thermodynamic performance of supercritical CO₂ (sCO₂) Brayton cycle deteriorates significantly due to the mismatch between the cold source temperature and the working fluid’s critical point. Here, we present the first study on the off-design performance of a novel supercritical CO₂ mixture Brayton cycle with floating critical points. A distillation based regulation subsystem is integrated into the power cycle to dynamically adjust the circulating composition of the binary CO₂ mixture, thereby making its critical point float with the ambient temperature and achieving good temperature matching. The off-design behavior of the system operating with the representative mixture is investigated based on an in-house code. The influence of trigger conditions of critical point regulation on energy consumption of the regulation process is investigated. When the maximum temperature difference of the design points for consecutive days is set to 3 °C, the equivalent power consumption can be limited to 2.34 × 10⁶ MJ per year, which affects the annual efficiency by less than 1 %. The results confirms that using the floating critical point method can improve the annual efficiency by 7 %-10.9 % and improve the specific output power by 6.1 %-9.4 % compared to the sCO₂ cycle, depending on the power plant locations.