A Study of the Rankine Cycle Generating System for Heavy Duty HV Trucks 2014-01-0678

In heavy duty (HD) trucks cruising on expressway, about 60% of input fuel energy is wasted as losses. So it is important to recover them to improve fuel economy of them. As a waste heat recovery system, a Rankine cycle generating system was selected. And this paper mainly reports it.

In this study, engine coolant was determined as main heat source, which collected energies of an engine cooling, an EGR gas and an exhaust gas, for collecting stable energy as much as possible. And the exergy of heat source was raised by increase coolant temperature to 105 deg C. As for improving the system efficiency, saturation temperature difference was expanded by improving performance of heat exchanger and by using high pressure turbine. And a recuperator which exchanges heat in working fluid between expander outlet and evaporator inlet was installed to recover the heat of working fluid at turbine generator. Then a working fluid pump was improved to reduce power consumption of the system. And Hydro-fluoro-ether was selected as suitable working fluid for the system for vehicles.

The Rankine cycle generating system consists of each component mentioned above was tested on the expressway cruising condition with combining the developed downsized engine. As a result of test, the fuel consumption was improved to 7.5%.