Geothermal Power Plants Modeling 101: Rigorous Rating
This blog is the first article in a series of Geothermal Power Plants Modeling. This 101 shows how a geothermal power plant is rigorously rated, thus the performance of the power plant can be guaranteed with great confidence.
As we know, the simplest (Organic Rankine Cycle) ORC involves four components, the vaporizer to vaporize the high pressure liquid into high pressure vapor to drive the expander to produce power; before pumping back to the vaporizer, the low pressure vapor at the expander discharge needs to be condensed in the condenser.
The vaporizer is shell and tube heat exchangers with two in parallel and two in series. The shell diameter is 37 inch and the length is 648 inch. Other details can be found in other tabs, such as tube information and so on.
The expander is a radius type with 28 inch diameter, running at a speed of 4600 RPM.
The condenser totally has 10 bays and more information can be found in other tabs.
The feed pump is rated with performance curves, provided by the vendor.
After the simulation is setup, users can simply change any parameter in the cycle to predict the power plant performance with great confidence, such as the brine temperature. At 280 F, the plant is producing 3726 HP. After changing the temperature to 282 F, it is producing about 3900 HP.
With the Rigorous rating method, the advantage is users can predict the performance with great confidence, the disadvantage is the slow calculation speed. Due to the slow calculation speed, it is almost impossible to optimize the plant output. For fast rating and optimization, please continue to read the series 201. Thanks for watching this video. It is brought to you by Guofu Chen. More interesting topics can be found at showcase.guofuchen.com
