• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.276-284
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to establish the designing method of ORC(Organic Rankine Cycle) radial inflow turbines. RTDM(Radial Turbine Design Modeler) Ver.2.1 which is a preliminary design program of radial inflow turbines was developed to achieve this purpose. The 200kW-class radial inflow turbine for OTEC(Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) was designed by using the RTDM Ver.2.1 and CFD(Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulation was performed to verify the accuracy of RTDM Ver.2.1. With the result of simulation, the accuracy of RTDM Ver.2.1 was almost 94.6% based on the designed total enthalpy drop of the radial inflow turbine. Strategy of adjusting the mass flow rate was adopted on this study to satisfy the requirements of its power and rotor outlet's conditions for the designed radial inflow turbine. The mass flow rate was consequently increased to 21.2 kg/s for the designed 200kW-class radial inflow turbine for OTEC, and then Total to total and Total to static efficiency are 89.8% and 85.36% respectively.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.40 no.6
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• pp.484-492
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• 2016

The turbine is an important component and has a significant impact on the thermodynamic efficiency of the organic Rankine cycle. A precise preliminary design is essential to developing efficient turbines. In addition, performance analysis and structural analysis are needed to evaluate the performance and structural safety. However, there are only a few exclusive studies on the development process of the radial inflow turbines for the organic Rankine cycle (ORC). In this study, a preliminary design of the ORC radial inflow turbine was performed. Subsequently, the performance and structural analysis were also carried out. The RTDM, which was developed as an in-house code, was used in the preliminary design process. The results of the performance analysis were found to be in good agreement with target performances. Structural analysis of the designed turbine was also carried out in order to determine whether the material selection for this study is suitable for the flow conditions of the designed turbine, and it was found that the selected aluminum alloy is suitable for the designed turbine. However, the reliability of the preliminary design algorithms and numerical methods should be strictly verified by an actual experimental test.