Presentations of the second webinar on R& Activities on sCO2 in Europe already available

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As already published on this website, the CO2OLHEAT Project coordinated by ETN Global is organizing, since September 2022, a series of webinars aimed at providing a forum where the R&D activities in the area of supercritical Carbon Dioxide technologies can be disseminated and made known to a wider audience. This initative has been joined by seven international and national projects, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission (CO2OLHEAT, COMPASsCO2, SCARABEUS, DESOLINATION, SOLARSCO2OL, sCO2-4-NPP) and by national R&D programmes in Germany (CARBOSOLA) and the Czech Republic (sCO2-Efekt).

 

The second webinar, held on December 5th, gathered a very large number of people interested in understanding the fundamentals of sCO2 compressor design and operation as well as the technical challenges that remain hindering the commercial deployment of sCO2 power cycles. Click here to download the presentations in a single file and get ready for the third webinar in Q3 2023: Component Challenge – Compressors.

 

 

 

The second episode of the webinar series on R& Activities on sCO2 in Europe organized by ETN will take place on December 5th

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As already published on this website, the CO2OLHEAT Project coordinated by ETN Global aims to demonstrate (at TRL7) the operation of a 2 MW Waste-Heat-to-power (WH2P) skid based on a 2MW-sCO2 cycle, able to efficiently valorize local waste heat at a significant temperature of 400°C in the CEMEX cement manufacturing plant in Prachovice (CZ).

 

ETN Global initiated, in September 2022, a series of webinars aimed at providing a forum where the R&D activities in the area of supercritical Carbon Dioxide technologies can be disseminated and made known to a wider audience. This initative has been joined by seven international and national projects, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission (CO2OLHEAT, COMPASsCO2, SCARABEUS, DESOLINATION, SOLARSCO2OL, sCO2-4-NPP) and by national R&D programmes in Germany (CARBOSOLA) and the Czech Republic (sCO2-Efekt).

 

The first webinar, held on September 22nd, aimed to introduce these projects in a single session, providing the main features of the project from technical and administrative standpoints. Opportunities for collaboration between projects and with stakeholders were also highlighted. Presentations can be downloaded from the SCARABEUS website: Link.

 

The second webinar is coming soon and it will be focused on “compressors”, since this was highlighted as one of the most critical research areas in order to deploy supercritical CO2 power cycles commercially. Three outstanding speakers will cover both fundamentals of sCO2 compressor design as well as technical challenges and industrial experiences: Giacomo Persico (Politecnico di Milano), Marco Ruggiero (Baker-Hughes) and Rasmus Rubycz (Atlas-Copco).

 

The event will take place on December 5th, 14.00 – 15.00 CET. Follow this link to registration: https://lnkd.in/eAtxEwZk

 

 

7th International Seminar on organic Rankine power systems hosted by University of Seville, a SCARABEUS partner – Save the date!

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The team led by David Sánchez, Professor of Energy Engineering at University of Seville, will organize the 7th International Seminar on Organic Rankine Cycle Power Systems. This edition of the conference will be held from 4th to 6th of September in the beautiful city of Seville, and will gather the main players across the entire supply chain of ORC power systems.

 

More information about the event is now available in the conference website and LinkedIn account

 

It’s time to mark your calendar for this exciting event!!!

 

 

 

New joint paper by Quantis, University of Seville, Abengoa, Baker-Hughes and Kelvion discusses the carbon footprint of the SCARABEUS concept

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A large team from within the SCARABEUS consortium has been assessing the carbon footprint of Concentrated Solar Power plants using supercritical power cycles running on Carbon Dioxide mixtures, in comparison with state of the art power plants relying on steam turbines. This collective work has looked into the contributions of construction and operation to carbon footprint, with a special focus on the singularities introduced by the utilization of an innovative working fluid.

The work was presented at the ASME conference held in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), June 13-17, at a very well attended session where an interesting discussion followed the presentation by Dr. Francesco Crespi, from University of Seville. Life Cycle Environmental Assessment is an ongoing task in SCARABEUS and further results will be published in the coming minths.

The paper is available in Open Access on the publisher’s website (link). Check the abstract below:

The SCARABEUS project, funded by the European Commission, is currently investigating the potential gains brought about by the utilization of carbon dioxide mixtures in supercritical power cycles of Concentrated Solar Power plants, in lieu of the common Rankine cycles based on steam turbines or even pure carbon dioxide cycles. The analysis has already confirmed that it is possible to attain thermal efficiencies higher than 51% when ambient temperatures exceed 40°C, which is unheard of when conventional technology or standard CO2 technology is used. Additionally, this extraordinary performance is achieved with simpler cycle layouts, therefore with lower capital costs. The additives considered include organic and inorganic compounds which are added to the raw carbon dioxide in a variable proportion, depending on the composition of the additive and on ambient temperature. Regardless, it is important to assess whether or not there is an additional environmental advantage in terms of carbon dioxide and other potential hazards brought about by the new chemicals in the system. This is presented in this paper where the results obtained so far by the consortium for the carbon footprint from a Life Cycle perspective are discussed. Along with the assumptions and methodology, the results are compared for three reference plants: state-of-the-art CSP plant based on steam turbines, innovative CSP plant using pure supercritical CO2 technology, and the SCARABEUS concept using supercritical CO2 mixtures. The results are promising as they suggest that it is possible to reduce the carbon footprint of a 110 MWe CSP plant to be significantly less than 27kgCO2/MWh from the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5)

Laboratorio Energia e Ambiente Piacenza working on the socio-economic assessment of the technology

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Laboratorio Energia e Ambiente Piacenza working on the socio-economic assessment of the technology

 

 

The team led by Marco Gabba at the Laboratorio Energia e Ambiente Piacenza is working on Task 5.5 of the project, focused on natural capital valuation and socio-economic assessment. To this end, Gabba’s team has set up a survey, with the objective to evaluate the advantages, costs and risks of a concentrating solar plant using a CO2-based mixture as working fluid starting from the assessments of experts / technicians in the sector, through a series of structured questions with quantitative parameters.

 

This is an excellent opportunity for anyone interested in contributing to and influencing the development of new generation Concentrated Solar Plants. Answering the survey takes less than ten minutes and the data collected are strictly technical, not including any personal information.

If you would like to provide your input, follow this link: https://lnkd.in/e5Z_gdxV

 

Thank you very much for your input!!!

Presentations from the joint dissemination event organized by ETN Global now available

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The joint dissemination event organized by the CO2OLHEAT Project, coordinated by ETN Global, on September 22nd was an ABSOLUTE SUCCESS. You can now download all presentations from the links below:

  • E. Lecomte, Directorate General for Energy (European Commission): EU Energy Policy Developments. Download.
  • A. Jäger, Technical University of Dresden: CARBOSOLA. Download.
  • D. Benítez, German Aerospace Center (DLR): Components’ and Materials’ Performance for Advanced Solar Supercritical CO2 Powerplants – COMPASsCO2. Download.
  • D. Sánchez, University of Seville: Supercritical CARbon dioxide/Alternative fluids Blends for Efficiency Upgrade of Solar power plants – SCARABEUS. Download.
  • G. Manzolini, Politecnico di Milano: DEmonstration of concentrated SOLar power coupled wIth advaNced desAlinaTion system in the gulf regION – DESOLINATION. Download.
  • R. Guedez, Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm (KTH): SOLAR based sCO2 Operating Low-cost plants – SOLARSCO2OL. Download.
  • R. Vijgen, European Turbine Network: Supercritical CO2 power cycles demonstration in Operational environment Locally valorising industrial Waste Heat – CO2OLHEAT. Download.
  • O. Frybort, Research Center Rez, Husinec (CVR): Development of innovative systems for efficient energy storage – sCO2-Efekt. Download.
  • A. Cagnac, Electricity of France (EDF): Innovative sCO2-based heat removal technology for an increased level of safety of nuclear power plants. Download.

 

Thank you again CO2OLHEAT for this excellent initiative. Looking forward to the next session

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SCARABEUS present at the Solar Helix meeting in Madrid

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The Dissemination Coordinator of SCARABEUS, Prof. David Sánchez from University of Seville, has been invited to join a clustering session organized by the ASTEP project: Application of Solar Thermal Energy to Processes . ASTEP is funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission, under Grant Agreement Ni. 884411, and its main objective is to successfully demonstrate the viability of applying solar thermal energy to partially cover heating, and heating and cooling demands on two different relevant industrial demo sites located on two different climate regions, and to further develop the implementation of solar thermal energy in industrial processes up to 400 ºC. More information about this project, coordinated by Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia – UNED (Spain), is available on their website: https://astepproject.eu/

 

With the aim to explore opportunities for joint dissemination and exploitation in the future, the clustering activity held on October 20th is an excellent opportunity to get acquainted with the portfolio of collaborative projects investigating how solar energy can be integrated into thermal process for the industry and to generate electric power.

 

Agenda of the meeting. Clustering activity scheduled at 15.00 – 16.30

New paper by University of Seville presents the exergy analysis of different transcritical Carbon Dioxide cycles for CSP applications

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The SCARABEUS team at University of Seville has recently published an assessment of transcritical cycles running on different Carbon Dioxide mixtures in Concentrated Solar Power applications. This assessment makes use of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, rather than the 1st Law that is commonly used, with the aim to identify the room for further performance enhancement. Three different dopants are considered: Hexafluorobenzene (for cycles operating at temperatures lower than 600ºC), Titanium Tetrachloride and Sulphur Dioxide.

The paper has been published in Renewable Energy (Elsevier) and it is available in Open Access on the publisher’s website (link). Check the abstract below:

This paper focuses on the thermodynamic comparison between pure supercritical Carbon Dioxide and blended transcritical Carbon Dioxide power cycles by means of a thorough exergy analysis, considering exergy efficiency, exergy destruction and efficiency losses from Carnot cycle as main figures of merit. A reference power plant based on a steam Rankine cycle and representative of the state-of-the-art (SoA) of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants is selected as base-case. Two different temperatures of the energy (heat) source are considered: 575 °C (SoA) and 725 °C (next generation CSP).

Compared to SoA Rankine cycles, CO2 blends enable cycle exergy efficiency gains up to 2.7 percentage points at 575 °C. At 725 °C, they outperform both SoA and pure CO2 cycles with exergy efficiencies up to 75.3%. This performance is brought by a significant reduction in the exergy destruction across the compression and heat rejection process rounding 50%. Additionally, it has been found that the internal condensation occurring inside the heat recuperator for those mixtures with a large temperature glide improves recuperator exergy efficiency, supporting the use of simpler layouts without split-compression. Finally, CO2 blends exhibit lower cycle exergy efficiency degradation than pure sCO2 in the event of an increase in the design ambient temperature.

A joint virtual dissemination event organized by CO2OLHEAT will be joined by SCARABEUS

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The CO2OLHEAT Project coordinated by ETN Global aims to demonstrate (at TRL7) the operation of a 2 MW Waste-Heat-to-power (WH2P) skid based on a 2MW-sCO2 cycle, able to efficiently valorize local waste heat at a significant temperature of 400°C in the CEMEX cement manufacturing plant in Prachovice (CZ).

 

CO2OLHEAT has organized a joint virtual dissemination event with a fabulous portfolio of ongoing national and international R&D projects focused on different aspects of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide technologies for power generation. SCARABEUS will be represented by Prof. David Sánchez, dissemination coordinator.

 

Do not miss this opportunity to be acquainted with the latest activities in this exciting topic, even more so given the current landscape of the energy sector and the associated need to push the development of new power generation technologies ensuring sustainability and security of supply.

 

The event will take place on September 22nd, 14.00 – 16.00 CEST. Follow this link to registration: https://lnkd.in/dTvVAKrD

 

 

 

A new joint paper between City, University of London (CUL) and Baker Hughes (BH) discussing the blade shape optimisation of the SCARABEUS turbine operating with sCO2-SO2 mixture

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City, University of London and Baker Hughes have been working on the turbomachinery design for the SCARABEUS project. A 130 MW axial turbine is designed to produce a net power output from the cycle of ~100 MWe. The design process starts by identifying the aerodynamic and mechanical design constraints based on industrial and academic experience, while these constraints are applied to produce the preliminary design using the available loss correlations. A further design assessment is conducted using numerical CFD/FEA simulations to optimise the turbine blades for performance maximisation and to ensure a safe and reliable operation.

This work was presented at the ASME conference held in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), June 13-17, by Abdelrahman Abdeldayem, from City, University of London on behalf of the team.

The paper is available in Open Access on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4055232

Abstract

Within this study, the blade shape of a large-scale axial turbine operating with sCO2 blended with dopants is optimized using an integrated aerodynamic-structural three-dimensional (3D) numerical model, whereby the optimization aims at maximizing the aerodynamic efficiency whilst meeting a set of stress constraints to ensure safe operation. Specifically, three candidate mixtures are considered, namely, CO2 blended with titanium tetrachloride (TiCl4), hexafluorobenzene (C6F6), or sulfur dioxide (SO2), where the selected blends and boundary conditions are defined by the EU project, SCARABEUS. A single passage axial turbine numerical model is setup and applied to the first stage of a large-scale multistage axial turbine design. The aerodynamic performance is simulated using a 3D steady-state viscous computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model while the blade stress distribution is obtained from a static structural finite element analysis simulation (FEA). A genetic algorithm is used to optimize parameters defining the blade angle and thickness distributions along the chord line while a surrogate model is used to provide fast and reliable model predictions during optimization using a genetic aggregation response surface. The uncertainty of the surrogate model, represented by the difference between the surrogate model results and the CFD/FEA model results, is evaluated using a set of verification points and is found to be less than 0.3% for aerodynamic efficiency and 1% for both the mass-flow rate and the maximum equivalent stresses. The comparison between the final optimized blade cross section has shown some common trends in optimizing the blade design by decreasing the stator and rotor trailing edge thickness, increasing the stator thickness near the trailing edge, and decreasing the rotor thickness near the trailing edge and decreasing the rotor outlet angle. Further investigations of the loss breakdown of the optimized and reference blade designs are presented to highlight the role of the optimization process in reducing aerodynamic losses. It has been noted that the performance improvement achieved through shape optimization is mainly due to decreasing the endwall losses with both the stator and rotor passages.