energies Article Two-Stage Radial Turbine for a Small Waste Heat y Recovery Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) Plant Ambra Giovannelli *, Erika Maria Archilei and Coriolano Salvini Department of Engineering, University of Roma Tre, Via della Vasca Navale, 79, 00146 Rome, Italy;
[email protected] (E.M.A.);
[email protected] (C.S.) * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +39-06-57333424 This work is an extended version of the paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Energy and y Environment Research ICEER 22–25 July 2019 held in Aveiro, Portugal and published in Energy Reports. Received: 21 January 2020; Accepted: 24 February 2020; Published: 27 February 2020 Abstract: Looking at the waste heat potential made available by industry, it can be noted that there are many sectors where small scale (< 100 kWe) organic Rankine cycle (ORC) plants could be applied to improve the energy efficiency. Such plants are quite challenging from the techno-economic point of view: the temperature of the primary heat source poses a low cutoff to the system thermodynamic efficiency. Therefore, high-performance components are needed, but, at the same time, they have to be at low cost as possible to assure a reasonable payback time. In this paper, the design of a two-stage radial in-flow turbine for small ORC industrial plants is presented. Compared to commonly applied mono-stage expanders (both volumetric and dynamic), this novel turbine enables plants to exploit higher pressure ratios than conventional plants. Thus, the theoretical limit to the cycle efficiency is enhanced with undoubted benefits on the overall ORC plant performance.