Several approaches to enhance the performance of Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) have been investigatedin literature, including architecture, workingfluid selection and part-load optimization together withcombined heat and power (CHP) generation. To contribute to these developments, the design and thefirst operation of an advanced ORC-CHP architecture is being presented in this study. This architectureextends the state of the art by a two-stage concept with turbine bleeding and a regenerative directcontact preheater. The aim of this architecture is to increase the heat source utilization,flexibility andpart-load efficiency. To evaluate the performance of this concept, a test rig has been constructed. It isheated with a 200 kW electrical heater and a twin-screw expander is being used. The low-GWPfluidR1233zd(E) is applied as workingfluid. In order to analyze the system in its full operating range, ex-periments are conducted with varying heat loads of the district heating network. Furthermore, anoperating strategy of the system is being developed. With thisfirst operation, a very high operationalrange of the novel ORC-CHP architecture down to a minimum load of 15.3% is being demonstrated.Furthermore, is could be proven that thermal efficiency increases during part-load operation.     «

Several approaches to enhance the performance of Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) have been investigatedin literature, including architecture, workingfluid selection and part-load optimization together withcombined heat and power (CHP) generation. To contribute to these developments, the design and thefirst operation of an advanced ORC-CHP architecture is being presented in this study. This architectureextends the state of the art by a two-stage concept with turbine bleeding and a regenerative direc...     »