A New Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Brayton Cycle with High Efficiency

Designing new and efficient heat engines and increasing the efficiency of previous ones is one of the researchers’ interests in the field of thermodynamics. In this regard, what is mainly concerned is to design a cycle with the positive features of previous cycles, such as less pollution, and higher power-to-weight ratio and efficiency. One of these cycles is the supercritical carbon dioxide cycle (SCDC). The main goal of this research is designing a highly efficient SCDC with pessimistic and relatively optimistic efficiencies of 45% and 47%. This paper includes the complete first law analysis of the designed cycle, designing and discussion of efficiency improvement methods and comparison of SCDC with other power cycles. The sensitivity of the cycle efficiency to some important parameters has also been studied. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.