Modeling of brazed plate heat exchangers for ORC systems

The current article presents a steady state ORC system simulation tool in which the main emphasis is given to braze plate heat exchanger (BPHE) modeling and selection. A unique 1D pressure-enthalpy based discretized method is developed for the simulation of heat exchanger components. The developed method is generic and can be adopted for simulating single phase, super-critical, evaporation and condensation processes with full or partial phase change. To improve the stability and speed of fluid property retrieval, a bilinear finite grid interpolation method based on property maps obtained from standard libraries such as NIST REFPROP and COOLPROP is developed.