Study of Gasoline Engine Waste Heat Recovery by Organic Rankine Cycle

Energy saving and environment protection are two important issues that today’s automobile industry must emphasize. Lots of heat energy waste with the exhaust gas when the engine is running. If this part of waste heat can be recovered, the energy efficiency will be improved. Thus plenty of energy can be saved and the global warming also can be reduced. In this paper, the organic Rankine cycle whose working fluid was R245fa was studied. It was adopted to recover the gasoline engine waste heat. The mathematical model of the organic Rankine cycle was built up in Matlab to search the optimized working condition. The pinch analysis method was used to analyze the outlet temperature of the exhaust gas. The results indicate that organic Rankine cycle is a good way to recover the gasoline engine waste heat, especially in the high load conditions. The temperature of the exhaust gas can be apparently decreased.