Preliminary conceptual design and performance assessment of combined heat and power systems based on the supercritical carbon dioxide power plant

Nuclear energy with attractive expectation can be efficiently used by the supercritical carbon dioxide power system. However, amounts of the cooling heat is wasted in the nuclear power plant. Two conceptual designs of combined heat and power systems based on the supercritical carbon dioxide power system are proposed to exploit the waste heat. A comparison research is performed in thermodynamics and economics. Several key physical parameters are selected to investigate their effects on system performance, and multi-objective optimization using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithms-II is carried out with the target of gaining maximum system exergy efficiency and minimum total product unit cost. The results of parameter analysis exhibit that there exist optimal values for two target functions with the increasing compressor pressure ratio for three thermal systems, and the system with heat pump needs the highest pressure ratio. Better system performance can be achieved by increasing the turbine inlet temperature and evaporator temperature. The multi-objective optimization results of genetic algorithm display that proposed two systems can gain an improvement by 7.02% and 8.45% for the system exergy efficiency, and 11.95% and 13.48% for the total product unit cost compared with the stand-alone supercritical carbon dioxide system, respectively.