Lorenzo Tocci will be presenting his work and new paper at ECOS 2018. The paper entitled A Neural Network approach to the optimal design of radial inflow turbines for ORC applications will be presented Thursday 21 according to the technical program.

Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) is widely considered as a promising technology for the exploitation of low grade thermal energy for the conversion into electrical power. The ORC technology is used to produce electricity from different sources such as biomass, waste heat recovery, solar and geothermal.
The design of the turbo-expander of Organic Rankine Cycle systems usually follows the fluid selection and the optimization of the thermodynamic parameters of the cycle. The efficiency of the turbo-expander is usually kept constant at this stage. However, the performance of ORC turbo-expanders are greatly affected by the organic fluid selected and the thermodynamic parameters of the cycle.
In this work, a neural network approach is used to derive a model of radial inflow turbines for the prediction of the efficiency of the machine, which can be easily integrated in the fluid selection and thermodynamic optimization process.

Entropea’s team will attend this year’s Towards Successful Commercialisation conference. If you’re interested in Waste Heat Recovery, come talk to us Wednesday 18th April 2018, at 1 Drummond Gate, Victoria, London between 08:30 – 19:00.

“The fourth Towards Successful Commercialisation Conference will give key players in the power, buildings, transport, waste and industrial sectors a chance to investigate major decarbonisation challenges alongside BEIS-funded entrepreneurs, investors and government policymakers. Workshops will let participants share ideas, gain insights and explore partnerships with market influencers, innovators and decision makers.”

If you’re interested into heat to power technologies and would like to hear what we do, come talk to Dr. Ioannis Pesmazoglou, CTO at Entropea Labs, at Cleantech Innovate 2018. We are happy to be part of Innovate UK’s Hub.

Innovate UK CEO Ruth McKernan and Claire Perry MP, Minister of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, talk to Tamas Pal, Business Developer at Entropea Labs, at Innovate 2017 at the NEC, Birmingham, 8 November 2017.

Entropea has  started a new project for developing an integrated, modular and retrofittable 20kWe ORC system for Heat to Power generation with volume costs not exceeding £2k/kWe. The 18 month Energy Entrepreneurs Fund financed project, entitled Mini-scale Organic Rankine Cycle for Waste Heat Recovery is running between November 2017 and May 2019.

Dr. Benjamin Franchetti and Tamas Pal from Entropea will attend the ORC 2017 Conference in Milan, the industry’s largest biannual conference.

Entropea’s engineer, Lorenzo Tocci will also be there and will present his work on Neural Networks for small scale ORC optimization.

“This study concerns a thermodynamic and technical optimization of a small scale Organic Rankine Cycle system for waste heat recovery applications. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) has been used to develop a thermodynamic model to be used for the maximization of the production of power while keeping the size of the heat exchangers and hence the cost of the plant at its minimum. R1234yf has been selected as the working fluid. The results show that the use of ANN is promising in solving complex nonlinear optimization problems that arise in the field of thermodynamics.”

Entropea has  started a new project as part of a consortium with Libertine and Brunel University.  The 10kWe ORC integrated free piston expander is a two year Innovate UK funded project, with total project budget of £868k, running between August 2017 and August 2019. “The project will demonstarte a modular 10kWe Free Piston Gas Expander (FPGE) prototype for distributed heat-to-power applications using heat from solar, biomass, engine exhaust waste heat and other sources. The close integration of multiple heat-to-power system components within the FPGE module will improve system efficiency, packaging and cost.”

Lorenzo Tocci is attending the Automotive Thermal Recuperation Conference in Berlin, Germany. He will be presenting on Tuesday 25 April Entropea’s Adapting Waste Heat Recovery Technologies for Low Carbon Off-Highway Vehicles project. The conference agenda is available here: Day1 & Day2.