{"id":1644,"date":"2011-09-29T15:20:59","date_gmt":"2011-09-29T15:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/?p=1644"},"modified":"2011-09-29T15:20:59","modified_gmt":"2011-09-29T15:20:59","slug":"pressure-rises-in-orc-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/?p=1644","title":{"rendered":"Pressure rises in ORC community"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1645\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-1645\" href=\"http:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/?attachment_id=1645\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1645\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-1645\" title=\"sc_dsc4330_548x365\" src=\"http:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/sc_dsc4330_548x365-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1645\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Professor Piero Colonna in his lab - Photo: Tomas van Dijk<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Some 300 researchers from around the world visited the seminar on  Organic Rankine Cycle power systems last week, organised by Professor  Piero Colonna (3mE).<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The interest in his field of research is directly related to the oil  price, says Professor Piero Colonna. It was high in the 1970s and now  pressure is building again, with major technology companies sniffing out  start-ups as a means of entering the market.<br \/>\nThe Rankine Cycle is  what drives 90 percent of all electric power plants, as it describes the  thermodynamic conversion of thermal energy into work, usually by  boiling up steam, which drives a turbine coupled to a generator. For  large systems (10 to 1,000 megawatts), there is nothing better. For  smaller systems, however, water cannot be used, and the adoption of an  organic fluid allows for very high efficiency rates. That\u2019s what Organic  Rankine Cycle or ORC stands for. Suitable organic fluids are less dense  than water and the larger volume occupied by the organic vapour is key  to the design of efficient turbines. By choosing the right fluid, ORC  engineers can maximise the system efficiency.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>You typically find ORC installations in smaller power plants that run  on biomass, geothermal, solar or waste heat. The maximum efficiency of  converting heat into power is about 30 percent, but currently most ORC  systems achieve about 20 percent. Prof. Colonna notes that since most  ORC units are run in cogeneration mode, the rest of the energy is used  as heat in a greenhouse or for district heating.<br \/>\nThe Delft renewable  energy systems group (at the faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and  Materials Engineering) operates at the forefront of the ORC development,  says the professor, who received an NWO Vidi grant in 2005. With  funding from STW and industry, his group is active in both fundamental  and applied research.<br \/>\nWhat does bother Prof. Colonna, and his guests,  however, is that it is so much harder to get funding for renewable  energy projects than their conventional energy counterparts. \u201cWe have so  many ideas to improve the technology,\u201d he says, \u201cbut in comparison with  conventional energy technology, we\u2019re dramatically underfunded.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>The conference was dedicated to Professor Gianfranco Angelino, one of the founders of the technology, who passed away last year.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some 300 researchers from around the world visited the seminar on Organic Rankine Cycle power systems last week, organised by Professor Piero Colonna (3mE). The interest in his field of research is directly related to the oil price, says Professor Piero Colonna. It was high in the 1970s and now pressure is building again, with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[97,323,359],"class_list":["post-1644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-delta","tag-colonna","tag-organic-rankine-cycle-orc","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joswassink.nl\/insight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}