NOVEMBER 2022

Considerations for Designing Supercritical Carbon

Dioxide Cycles and Turbomachinery

Concepts NREC White Paper

Considerations for Designing Supercritical Carbon Dioxide
Cycles and Turbomachinery
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 Considerations for Designing Supercritical Carbon Dioxide
Cycles and Turbomachinery
David Schowalter, Ph.D., Concepts NREC

Executive Summary

There are numerous benefits of supercritical carbon dioxide power generation systems, including
reduced size and cost. Highly non-linear fluid properties enable the development of unique cycles
targeted at specific applications. These fluid properties, however, represent just one of the challenges of
designing these systems. Other challenges include increased mechanical stresses, tight manufacturing
tolerances, and secondary flow path control.

Reducing the risk of working with supercritical carbon dioxide is a key factor for successful
projects. Firstly, appropriate tools for cycle and component design need to address the non-linear fluid
properties, specifically. In addition, mechanical considerations such as stability, control, large thrust
forces and rotordynamics must also be taken into account. Finally, adequate testing will always play a
role. Addressing these considerations early in the design and development process will improve the
likelihood of a winning supercritical CO2 endeavor.

Introduction
In recent years, supercritical carbon dioxide cycles for converting thermal energy to mechanical
and electrical power has earned the attention of the power generation community and of
government research and funding agencies. The theoretical cycle efficiency is much higher than
other Brayton or Rankine cycles currently in use, particularly for high temperature systems (such
as advanced nuclear reactors or concentrated solar power). Reduced costs and water use, a
smaller footprint and higher efficiency are all possible for fossil fuel power as well.

Notwithstanding this promising outlook, however, there are significant technical challenges to
be addressed. Given the interest from industry, it is helpful for those investigating system
feasibility and design to have an introduction to the advantages and challenges of supercritical
CO2 systems, and some of the methodologies being used to address them.

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Unique Characteristics of Supercritical CO2 and Associated Systems
A supercritical carbon dioxide system works on the same principle as a Brayton cycle but
operates above the critical point of the working fluid, CO 2. This results in several unique
advantages and challenges. We list them here for reference, as they are well covered in the
literature and are likely very familiar to the readers of this white paper.

Advantages
One major benefit of supercritical carbon dioxide systems is the ability to operate at extremely
high thermal efficiencies. To attain the highest efficiencies, the system must operate at very high
energy source temperatures, typically above 700°C. Such high temperatures can be achieved in
advanced nuclear reactors and concentrated solar power applications, so supercritical CO 2 has
been considered for these applications. Another major benefit of a supercritical system is the
high power density of the fluid, resulting in a reduced size of the CO 2 turbine and compressor
relative to steam turbines and natural gas turbine engines, making supercritical CO 2 applicable
to traditional thermal power systems, as well, despite the lower temperatures. In general, for
the same power output, the equipment size for a supercritical CO 2 system will be about one
tenth that for a steam system. In theory, this could reap very large savings in material and
manufacturing costs. Yet another advantage is the very low viscosity of supercritical CO 2 as
compared to other working fluids, yielding further increased turbomachinery efficiencies and
reduced parasitic losses.

Supercritical CO2 is even applicable to waste heat recovery where the thermal variation will be
even less than for a fossil fuel system. In this application, other working fluids, such as those
used in Organic Rankine Cycles can be expensive and toxic, whereas carbon dioxide has neither
of these disadvantages.

To summarize, major advantages of supercritical carbon dioxide systems include:

• High thermal efficiency

• Reduced size/high power density
• Increased mechanical efficiency
• Reduced toxicity
• Working fluid availability

Challenges
Achieving the highest efficiencies for these systems requires very high pressures, resulting in
large mechanical forces and stresses. Wall thicknesses need to increase drastically for all
pressure barriers, and management of secondary flows in the turbomachinery becomes a major
focus. With the much smaller impellers rotating at higher speed, and the need to control
secondary flows carefully, manufacturing tolerances will necessarily become very tight.

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Thus, major challenges for supercritical CO 2 systems are:

• Control of secondary flow paths

• Tight part tolerances
• Large mechanical forces and stresses

Cycle Design

The typical Brayton cycle for a heat recovery supercritical carbon dioxide cycle is shown
schematically in Figure 1. As with all Brayton cycles, energy from
compression and heat addition is captured with a single phase
turbine. This cycle uses both a main compressor and a recycle
compressor employing low temperature and high temperature
recuperators. The cycle takes advantage of large single phase
density variations with relatively small changes in pressure and Unique sCO
2
temperature for supercritical CO2.
Cycles: Carbon
Sequestration
One way of eliminating carbon
emissions from fossil fuel
combustion is to capture the
carbon dioxide and
“sequester” it, usually in deep
geological storage. Doing this
requires significant
compression of the captured
CO2, however, which puts a
very high parasitic load on the
power plant (as high as 10%-
Figure 1: Supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle heat recovery cycle 15%).

A solution to this problem is to

use the captured carbon
Although the turbomachinery for supercritical CO 2 cycles can be
dioxide within a supercritical
quite small, heat exchangers may need to be very large, which is cycle that is thermally linked to
an important consideration when space is limited, such as in the Pressure Swing Absorption
transportation applications. The cycle efficiency is highly (PSA) carbon capture process.
This can reduce the net power
dependent upon the turbine inlet temperature, and maximizing
required for the capture and
that requires a high heat exchanger effectiveness, or heat sequestration process by 30%
exchanger size. Note that there is a trade-off here, in that raising to 40%. (DiBella, 2022)
the efficiency of the turbine and compressors can be exchanged
for smaller heat exchangers. It has been shown that a 50%

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increase in high temperature recuperator size is equivalent to a 4% increase in efficiency for the
compressors and turbine (DiBella & Pasch, 2018).

There may also be unique opportunities to incorporate advanced technologies in place of the
recycle compressor and the additional recuperator. For example, one study (DiBella, 2015)
showed that a cycle could deploy thermoelectric generators, which directly create a current from
temperature differences across certain metals (essentially the same technology as a
semiconductor). It has been shown that using these devices within heat exchangers in a cycle to
capture waste heat from a shipboard gas turbine can increase efficiencies by up to 20% when
operating at reduced load.

Whatever the application, the required design points for the associated supercritical carbon
dioxide system components (turbomachinery, heat exchangers, etc.) will initially be determined
based upon the design of the thermodynamic cycle. The design goals are likely to include heat-
to-power efficiency and/or an operating range that will make the system cost-effective and
functional. Initially, realistic assumptions can be made about individual component
performance so that cycle concepts can be evaluated. Eventually, these assumptions can be
replaced with more sophisticated models and/or empirical performance data. The design of the
cycle and the components thus becomes an iterative process with refinements along the way.
Having a cycle design tool that allows for straightforward (ideally interactive) addition and
adjustment of the various components and how they connect to one another, as well as
connectivity to component models will make this process much more effective and efficient
(Figure 2).

Figure 2: The user interface of Concepts NREC’s CYCAL, an example of a

thermodynamic cycle design and analysis tool

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Fluid Properties and Turbomachinery Design

Carbon dioxide properties above the critical point are highly nonlinear functions of temperature
and pressure, resulting in challenges for design. This is particularly true when inflow conditions
for a compressor shift towards the liquid side of the saturation line. The speed of sound
changes very drastically as a function of pressure and temperature, resulting in choking flow for
Mach numbers well below one. Off-design compressor performance can be severely impacted
due to these effects, and care must be taken during the design process to consider the
necessary range of operation (Anderson, 2020).

Given this highly non-linear behavior, it can be difficult to evaluate how turbomachinery
performance maps will change with varying inlet operating conditions. For fluids behaving
nearly like a perfect gas, flow rate and pressure ratio are normalized to use a flow coefficient
and pressure coefficient, respectively. An appropriate scaling has been developed to make map
corrections even for complex fluids such as supercritical carbon dioxide (Anderson, 2021), and
this can be very useful when evaluating how existing turbomachinery would perform under
different operating conditions.

The fluid property variations are also an important factor for design and analysis tools.
Generally, design tools make a “thermodynamic equilibrium” assumption for bulk fluid
properties, and any multiphase transitions (with nucleation and localized phase change models)
are ignored. This works well for turbomachinery, where the residence time in a two-phase
region is small compared to nucleation times. Local phase change models, even for 3D
computational fluid dynamics, remain largely a research topic, with many coefficients that need
application-specific empirical data for tuning. When the software has to interact with the fluid
library (NIST, for example) at each iteration, the operation becomes sluggish, resulting in an
inefficient design process. Additionally, NIST tables have rigid limits, and a reasonable
extrapolation is often required for iterative solution methods, even if the final results will be
within the property table limits. Streamlined fluid property schemes, such as fast tables for
supercritical CO2 can lead to more than a 200% reduction in solution time, resulting in drastically
improved design engineering return on investment (Anderson, 2018), (Figure 3).

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 Figure 3: Concepts NREC’s AxCent software’s multi-stream tube analysis code employing fast tables

Mechanical Considerations
As mentioned above, high mechanical forces and stresses are a major challenge with
supercritical CO2 turbomachinery. The higher density fluid, smaller impellers and shafts, high
rotation rates, and higher pressures all contribute to this challenge. Controlling the secondary
flow paths means that tolerances are tight, and sensitivity to displacements is very high. The
temperatures also have an impact, and it is important to keep the seals at low temperature and
minimize the heat flow in the adjacent bearing housing. This usually requires an increase in
shaft length to add thermal barriers elevating the importance of rotordynamic stability. In the
rotordynamic design and analysis process, aerodynamic cross-coupling coefficients are difficult
to estimate accurately and so testing is critical.

Static forces are also high relative to other turbomachinery applications. If there is an instability,
and the fluid conditions experience a transient, this can result in large axial forces, and possibly
very expensive maintenance costs.

One possible solution to the challenges of mechanical forces is the use of magnetic bearings.
The nature of the technology allows for real-time kinematic diagnostics and control (Fairman,
2022). Measuring displacements and deploying the appropriate stabilizing control algorithms
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provides real promise to address these challenges. This approach has the potential to
significantly reduce risk, always a major concern in the power generation industry.

Conclusions

While supercritical carbon dioxide heat-to-power systems hold promise for reduced size and
cost as well as opening up flexibility in cycle design, there are associated challenges, including
increased mechanical stresses, tight manufacturing tolerances, and highly non-linear fluid
properties. System and component design engineers should plan carefully for these challenges
and ensure that their tools can address them.

References

Anderson, M. (2018). Atypical Fluid Behavior on the Liquid Side of the Saturation Line of CO2
With Implications for Compressor Design. The 6th International Supercritical CO2 Power
Cycles Symposium, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Anderson, M. (2020). Compressor Design with Highly Variable Fluid Properties Near the Critical
Point and Liquid Region of CO2. Proceedings of the Fourth Chinese International
Turbomachinery Conference, Guang Zhou, China.

DiBella, F. A. (2015). Gas turbine engine exhaust waste heat recovery using supercritical CO2
Brayton cycle with thermoelectric generator technology. ASME Power and Energy
Conversion Conference.

DiBella, F. A., & Pasch, J. (2018). A Consideration for Trading Regenerator Size with Turbine
Improved Efficiency in SCO2 Systems to Enable a More Economical SCO2 System. The 6th
International Supercritical CO2 Power Cycles Symposium, Pittsburgh, PA.

Fairman, K. (2022). Machinery Health Monitoring and Component Testing Using a Magnetic
Bearing with a Supercritical CO2 Turbomachine. The 7th International Supercritical CO2
Power Cycles Symposium, San Antonio, TX.