Thermodynamic analysis of a Brayton cycle and Rankine cycle arranged in series exploiting the cold exergy of LNG (liquefied natural gas)

The LNG cold exergy is exploited to cool the He used in the CBC to cryogenic temperatures at the compressor inlet as well as for generating electric power through direct expansion. The power plant is thermodynamically modelled and simulated using EES (Engineering Equation Solver). An energy and exergy analysis is carried out to evaluate the effect of some key parameters on the efficiency such as the temperature at the compressor inlet, the compression ratio, the temperature at the CBC turbine inlet and the LNG pressure during the regasification process. The outcome is a high efficiency power plant.