Economic optimization of a Kalina cycle for a parabolic trough solar thermal power plant

The Kalina cycle has recently seen increased interest as a replacement for the more traditional steam Rankine cycle for geothermal, solar, ocean thermal energy conversion and waste heat recovery applications. The Kalina cycle uses a mixture of ammonia and water as the working fluid. The ammonia-water mixture evaporates and condenses with a temperature glide, thus providing a better match with the heat source/sink temperature profile. This better match results in reduced thermal irreversibility, but at the cost of relatively larger heat exchanger areas. The parabolic trough collector is the most mature technology for the conversion of solar thermal energy into electricity. In this paper, a Kalina cycle and a steam Rankine cycle are compared in terms of the total capital investment cost for use in a parabolic trough solar thermal power plant without storage. In order to minimize the total capital investment cost of the Kalina cycle power plant (the solar field plus the power cycle), an optimization was performed by varying the turbine outlet pressure, the separator inlet temperature and the separator inlet ammonia mass fraction. All the heat exchangers were modelled as shell and tube type using suitable heat transfer correlations, and appropriate cost functions were used to estimate the costs for the various plant components. The optimal capital investment costs were determined for several values of the turbine inlet ammonia mass fraction and among the compared cases, the Kalina cycle has the minimum capital investment cost of 5851.2 United States Dollars (USD) per kW of net electrical power output. The steam Rankine cycle has much higher investment costs (7625.1 USD/kW) mainly due to the limitation imposed by the minimum turbine outlet vapour quality constraint.