Team: Loco - Optimitism: Topic: Waste Energy Recovery From Locomotive Engine

Team: Loco_optimitism
Topic: Waste energy recovery from Locomotive engine

ABSTRACT
Working Principle of the proposed idea:
The idea is to implement the Organic Rankine Cycle(ORC) for recovering the waste heat energy
between the engine and the radiator. ORC systems use an organic fluid with a high molecular
mass and a low vaporization point, e.g. silicone oil. These working fluids allow very efficient
exploitation of low-temperature heat sources, e.g. engine coolant, to produce electricity. Unlike
the water-steam-cycle, the heat in the coolant can be harnessed for both preheating and
evaporating the working fluid.

1. Thermal heat rejection 65%, that is 2-2.8 MW of heat rejection for 4500 HP to 6000 HP
2. 20 to 30 % of heat generated from the power stroke in combustion in the engine is
wasted and warms the part in contact with the combustion chamber, so the cooling
system is basically designed to carry away this particular amount of heat from the
system so that the engine works in the optimal conditions
3. And around 30-40% of heat gets rejected from the engine exhaust (Temperature around
400-8000C) which gets further transmitted to the turbocharger to compress the air used
for combustion and then released to the atmosphere through the chimney.
4. In the cooling system in locomotive, where water cooling system is installed, water is
used to cool the engine blocks, oil, and the components of the turbocharger.
5. The heated water coming from the engine block comes to the bubble collector where the
steam and the water gets separated and the steam gets transported to the Extension
tank and also the heated water that comes from the turbocharger gets transported to
the steam collector where again the steam gets transported to the Extension tank, in two
of these cases the water when separated with the steam gets transmitted to the radiator
where is gets further cooled.
6. Hereby we are proposing two approaches for implementation of the idea:
a. First approach: Assuming that if the bubble collector is removed and the heat
exchanger is being fitted between the radiator and the heated water coming directly
from the engine blocks, the steam coming from the steam collector is enough to
regulate the pressure in the whole cooling system since the performance of the
cooling system greatly depend upon the total pressure in the system. The motive
here is to recover the maximum amount of heat from the steam and liquid mixture of
water rather than separating the steam from the mixture and this would not add up
to any significant changes in the design
b. Second approach: If removing the bubble collector is having a significant effect in
the total pressure of the cooling system and its becomes difficult to regulate the total
pressure in the cooling system then the idea is to fit a heat exchanger between the
bubble collector and the radiator that will basically collect the heat from heated
water being transmitted from the bubble collector to the radiator
7. Along with the above two methods one heat exchanger can be installed to extract the
heat from the exhaust released from the turbocharger. Since the exhaust temperature
from the turbocharger is high enough we can use normal Rankine cycle here

PROS
1. Minimum infrastructure change: Implementing this cycle would just require the addition of a
heat exchanger or removal of the bubble collector. So this makes upgrading of the already
existing locomotive engine design quite easy.
2. High cycle efficiency: In theory ORC has a high cycle efficiency of 17%-20%. So even if we
manage to get an efficiency of 10% we could recover energy in the kW scale considering energy
loss is in MW scale.
3. Low operating temperature: Since our coolant temperature will not exceed 120oC , using a
normal Rankine cycle is not feasible for the heat exchangers between the engine radiator
4. Extensive support: ORC is a well-researched topic and we have optimized the setup for a
variety of conditions. Thus we can focus the majority of our attention on implementing the
cycle, rather than doing research on optimizing the cycle as per our needs.

PLAN OF ACTION
Our main task will be to design a heat exchanger that can extract energy from the system
connecting the engine to the radiator, and from the exhaust gases released from the
turbocharger. The energy extracted will be used to bring the working fluid of the respective
Rankine Cycle to the required input conditions of the turbine. This implies that we must fix a
turbine that will be used in the cycles(else we won’t know the input conditions of turbine).The
selection of turbine will involve databasing available turbine for their input conditions, then we
will look into the feasibility of achieving those conditions from the waste heat that we have and
from this we can decide an optimal turbine for the cycle. The turbine will be connected to a
generator that will produce electricity which can be stored or used as per our needs.
The plan is to simulate the design of the heat exchanger on Ansys to verify our numerical
estimations. We have planned to run simulations using Ansys or any other suitable software to
verify our design of the heat exchanger. The plan is to perform the simulation in order to verify
whether our design is able to achieve the required input conditions of the turbine and optimise
the design of heat exchanger. Usually, the input conditions of the turbine are superheat,
pressure, mass flow rate, etc.Two different types of heat exchangers will be designed as one will
be used to extract heat from exhaust gas and the other will extract heat from the cooling
system. Along with design optimization economic feasibility will also be a point of focus.

Team: Loco - Optimitism: Topic: Waste Energy Recovery From Locomotive Engine

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Topic: Waste energy recovery from Locomotive engine

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