Towards high-performance of organic flash cycle through cycle configuration improvement: State-of-art research

Considering that it can significantly reduce the irreversible loss in the heat exchange process, the organic flash cycle (OFC) was proposed as a feasible alternative with great potential to the organic Rankine cycle (ORC). Furthermore, many modified configurations of OFC have been proposed in the existing literature. However, studies on these configurations are fragmented and lack a systematic summary of existing configurations, which cannot provide a roadmap that can guide subsequent studies on the construction of configurations. Therefore, this study aims to bridge this gap. According to whether new types of components (i.e., the internal heat exchanger, two-phase expander, and ejector) are introduced or not, this study firstly divides the improvement measures for the OFC configuration into two categories. Then, thirty-two modified configurations of OFC existing in the literature are summarized. Furthermore, the connections between these configurations are deeply revealed and exploration space for more configurations is presented. Finally, based on the analysis of the improvement measures and existing configurations, some suggestions for modifying the OFC configuration are put forward. Configurations with ejectors and polygeneration configurations are worthy of further research in the future.