Enhancing performance of multi-pressure evaporation organic Rankine Cycle/Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Brayton cycle through genetic algorithm and Machine learning optimization

The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Brayton combined cycle is one of the most important ways to enhance the performance of the cycle. Since the considerable exergy loss resulting from large temperature differences in the heat exchangers of combined cycles, the multi-pressure evaporation concept was adopted from Organic Rankine cycle research. Two novel multi-pressure evaporation configurations, namely parallel evaporation Brayton combined cycle and series evaporation Brayton combined cycle, are designed with the purpose of enhancing SCO2 Brayton cycle performance. The performance of the two new cycles was compared with that of the baseline cycle. Moreover, Printed Circuit Heat Exchangers were employed to improve the overall compactness of the cycles. The results from model calculations were utilized to train an Artificial intelligence neural network model using machine learning techniques which allowed to simplify the cycle and improves the computational speed. Subsequently, genetic algorithm was employed to conduct multi-objective optimization on the three cycles. Finally, a detailed exploration was conducted from the perspective of thermal and exergy to elucidate the reasons for the advantages and differences between the two new cycles compared to the baseline cycle. The results indicate that the series Brayton combined cycle exhibits the highest performance, and the combined cycle of multi-pressure evaporation helps to improve the performance of the combined cycle. Compared to the baseline cycle, the combined cycle efficiency of both series and parallel combined cycles has increased from 45.54% to 46.18% and 46.29%, respectively, while the bottom cycle efficiency has improved from 3.81% to 4.93% and 5.03%. The ratio of heat exchange area to net output power increased from 0.6051 to 0.6614 and 0.6740 for the parallel and series cycles, respectively. Thermal analysis shows that, the fundamental purpose of changing the layout is to improve the specific power per unit of working medium in the cycle. Exergy analysis shows that, the two new combined cycles improve cycle efficiency by reducing exergy losses in the intermediate heat exchanger. Compared to the parallel version, the series version's staged compression allows for a lower temperature difference in intermediate heat exchanger 1, resulting in smaller exergy losses and higher cycle efficiency. This work will contribute to an enhanced understanding of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide combined cycles within the academic community and the introduction of multi-pressure evaporation will further improve the performance of these important cycles.