Thermodynamic analysis of a novel ammonia-water cogeneration system for maritime diesel engines

This paper proposes a novel cogeneration system based on Kalina cycle and absorption refrigeration system to meet the design requirements of China State Shipbuilding Corporation, which is efficiently satisfy the power and cooling demands of a maritime ship at the same time. Unlike most of the combined systems, this cogeneration system is highly coupled and realizes cogeneration without increasing the system complexity too much. The basic ammonia mass fraction of this novel system is increased, so that the ammonia concentration of ammonia-water steam from the separator can be higher, which contributes to lower refrigerating temperature and thus less heat loss in the distillation process. In addition, higher ammonia concentration solution makes overheating easier, which improves the thermal efficiency. Moreover, the system has two recuperators to make further improvement of the thermal efficiency. Thermodynamic models are developed to investigate the system performance and parametric analysis is conducted to figure out the effects of including working fluid temperature at the outlet of the evaporator, working fluid temperature at superheater outlet, mass fraction of ammonia in basic solution, turbine inlet pressure, temperature of cooling water at the inlet of condensers and the refrigeration evaporation temperature on the system performance. Furthermore, the cogeneration system is optimized with genetic algorithm to obtain the best performance, which achieves 333.00kW of net power output, 28.83 kW of cooling capacity and 21.81% of thermal efficiency. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is compared with an optimized recuperative organic Rankine cycle (ORC) system and an optimized Kalina cycle system 34 (KCS34) using the same heat source. The results show that the thermal efficiency and power output of the novel cogeneration system is 3.89% and 1.05% higher than that of the recuperative ORC system and KCS34 system respectively.