Experimental investigation on multi-vane expander operating conditions in domestic CHP ORC system

This paper reports the results of experimental investigations carried out on domestic CHP ORC system adopting multi-vane expander under varied operating conditions. The experimental results showed that the expander indicated work varies in the range of 0.96-4.18 kJ/kg while its internal efficiency varies in the range of 17.2-58.3 % depending on the experimental conditions. Moreover, the results of numerical investigations on multi-vane expander operating conditions are presented. The numerical model of the expander was validated using the data obtained from the experiment and analyses were performed in ANSYS CFX software. The results proved that multi-vane expanders are suitable for domestic ORC systems and are a promising alternative to the other types of volumetric expanders used in such systems.