Assessment of ternary CO₂ mixtures as working fluids in supercritical Brayton cycles with floating critical points

The performance of the supercritical CO₂ (sCO₂) Brayton cycle deteriorates due to the mismatch between critical temperature and cold source temperature. An innovative solution based on ternary CO₂ mixtures with adjustable compositions is proposed to expand the variation range of the critical temperature. An in-house MATLAB code is developed to investigate the design-point performance of the proposed system. The results indicate that the effect of improving cycle efficiency by using the modified floating critical point method becomes increasingly significant as the target critical temperature deviates from that of CO₂. The CO₂–H₂S–Kr is screened out as the best ternary mixture, with the cycle efficiency being increased by over 8 % compared to the sCO₂ cycle at very high (45 °C) and low (−15 °C) temperatures. The long-term performance is also evaluated based on the hourly historical weather data of two typical climate regions. The annual performance depends on both the average value and the distribution characteristics of the local ambient temperature. A relative improvement in annual average efficiency of 7%–9.56 % can be obtained depending on the regions. The present work is helpful to make the supercritical Brayton cycle give full play to its efficiency advantage in a wide cold source temperature range.