Case studies on performance prediction of radial inflow turbine under multiple rotor structures and organic fluids

Due to the lack of selection criteria for the ORC radial inflow turbine's loss models, and information about the models' limitations. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis for performance prediction of the ORC radial inflow turbine, and a novel turbine performance prediction program is proposed. This study can be divided into two parts, during the analysis part, 125 cases of CFD simulation were conducted under 5 rotor structures and R245fa as the working fluid. The performance of 6 loss models and their 18 combinations were compared. And in the examination part, another three organic fluids from different categories were chosen to exam the reliability of the proposed prediction program. The results show that loss model combinations E, O, and Q have a good performance in rotor loss prediction. Besides, Δβ₄ has an important influence on prediction reliability and turbine performance, it should be lower than a certain value (about 40° in this paper) during the analysis process to get relatively reliable results under different rotor structures. The proposed program can realize an acceptable accuracy for turbine performance prediction under multiple organic fluids and rotor structures, with an efficiency deviation within ±5% and an output power relative error within ±10%.