Organic Rankine Cycle System Preliminary Design with Corn Cob Biomass Waste Burning as Heat Source

The renewable energy source potencies in Indonesia are needed to be utilized to fulfill the electricity requirement in rural or remote area that not yet get electricity. One of the potency is biomass waste. Therefore, this paper discusses about the electricity generation preliminary design of Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) system with corn cob biomass waste burning as heat source, so it can be obtained the theoretic corn farm area requirement, electricity power, and thermal efficiency at heat source temperature and flow rate variations. Corn cob burning temperature can heat up the heating fluid that is heated by boiler with corn cob as the biomass fuel. Furthermore, that heating fluid is used as ORC electricity generation heat source. The independent variables in this study are the heating fluid temperature which varied between 110, 120, and 130oC, and the heating fluid flow rate that varied between 100, 150, and 200 liter/minute. R141b is selected to be the working fluid, palm oil is used for heating fluid and water as cooling fluid. The calculation results that the theoretic electricity power, thermal efficiency, and corn farm area requirement, respectively, are in the range of 3.5-8.5 kW, 9.2-10.3%, and 49.5-101.1 hectare/year. All of the highest range values are resulted at the highest temperature and flow rate, 130oC and 200 liter/minute. This result shows that corn cob burning heat is potential to be utilized as electricity generation heat source for rural society, particularly for some areas that have been studied.