Abstract—This article presents a Rankine cycle (RC) system as an additional power generation process, which uses the waste heat of a vehicle equipped with an internal combustion engine (ICE). A brief review of different heat recovery technologies leads to the identification of the RC system as a favorable solution for vehicle applications. The paper focuses on the performance evaluation of the evaporator heat exchanger (HEX) that is suitable for ICE waste heat recovery. The HEX performance depends on several parameters such as its structure, heat transfer area and temperature difference between hot gas and the RC working fluid. The investigated HEX is a cross-flow heat exchanger, simple and robust, with the working fluid circulating inside the tubes. A test bench that includes the vehicle and the RC system that uses water as working fluid, has been built in order to measure the HEX performance. A detailed description of the experimental setup is presented. Finally, test bench measurements of the applied vehicle coupled with the HEX fitted on the RC system were carried out.
Index Terms—Waste heat recovery, Rankine cycle, evaporator heat exchanger, experimental results.
The authors are with the School of Technology and Management, Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Leiria, Morro do Lena – Alto Vieiro Apt. 4163, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal (e-mail: {helder.santos, nuno.pires, david.caseiro, joel.morgado, fonseca.pereira, nuno.martinho}@ipleiria.pt).
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Cite:H. Santos, N. Pires, D. Caseiro, J. Morgado, J. F. Pereira, and N. Martinho, "Experimental Study of an Evaporator Heat Exchanger for a Rankine Cycle Vehicle Waste Heat Recovery System," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 362-366, 2016.
