A recent review of waste heat recovery by Organic Rankine Cycle

The increment of using fossil fuels has caused many perilous environmental problems such as acid precipitation, global climate change and air pollution. More than 50% of the energy that is used in the world is wasted as heat. Recovering the wasted heat could increase the system efficiency and lead to lower fuel consumption and CO2 production. Organic Rankine cycle (ORC) which is a reliable technology to efficiently convert low and medium temperature heat sources into electricity, has been known as a promising solution to recover the waste heat. There are numerous studies about ORC technology in a wide range of application and condition. The main objective of this paper is to presents a review of studies both theoretical and experimental on ORC usage for waste heat recovery and investigation on the effect of cycle configuration, working fluid selection and operating condition on the system performance, that have been developed during the last four years. Finally, the related statistics are reported and compared regarding the configuration and the employed working fluid with type of the heat source.