Good afternoon, I’m Valerio Francesco Barnabei from Sapienza University of Rome and I’m here to present

you a design and CFD analysis of a Lungstrom turbine in a micro Organic Rankine Cycle for a Waste Heat
Recovery system on board of a heavy duty truck, having the goal to recover enough energy to supply the
electric system, in order to reduce fuel consumption by a significative amount on the long distance.

The Lungstrom turbine is a multistage radial outflow turbine composed of two counter-rotating disks,
where several concentric blades sets are fitted on, each stage is composed by two rotors and no stators.
The flow has the typical behavior of the axial cascades, as it proceeds along the radius. This design has been
chosen since it provides a smaller axial size – a critical parameter for an on board application – and a slower
machine, if compared to traditional axial and radial solutions.

The design started from the analysis of the ORC using CamelPro, a process simulator developed by our
department: the hot source of the cycle is waste heat at 673K, from exhaust gasses, of a 500kW internal
combustion engine, while the cold source is water from the cooling system of the truck. This application
requires a regenerative heat exchanger to avoid overload at the condenser. As shown in the table toluene
is the working fluid and the thermodynamic efficiency has a low value, around 11%.

Both the choice of toluene and the low thermodynamic efficiency can be explained by the low amount of
energy involved in a micro ORC application, therefore there are two alternative approaches to design a
cycle: maximize the thermodynamic efficiency or maximize the working fluid mass-flow rate, for the same
amount of thermal power. The Ljungstrom turbine architecture presents innate large flow areas, increases
along the radius; thus a high volume flow rate is required in order to maximize the blade’s height for
manufacturing issues. Therefore, the choice of a low density fluid such as toluene, is suggested.

The sizing of the machine relies on the hypothesis of Euler’s Turbomachinery equations, which are one-
dimensional kinematic field, steady state flow and no mechanical losses. In addition, the assumption of
isentropic expansion has been considered to simplify this preliminary design. With an iterative process
analysis we obtain the velocity triangles for our turbine, from which the blade were drawing.

This iterative process design started from the fixed input data given by the ORC (on the red part of the
table): in addition the process is based on the variation of several kinematic and geometric parameters,
called controlled input in the table(yellow part), where we have load and flow coefficients. So constantly
monitoring the system outputs, it has been possible to fit blade’s angles values into a typical axial cascade
range, as already done in former Ljungstrom design experiences. This process give us a compact Ljungstrom
Turbine with diameter of 30 centimeters, which provides about 40 kW, with a subsonic flow in every row.

A CFD two-dimensional simulation has been performed using Ansys Fluent for the first and second row. The
blades profile is the result of an iterative optimization observing the flow behavior on each simulation. The
periodic analysis domain has been divided into five sub-domains: the two rotors counter-rotating surfaces,
a thin annulus, and the inlet and outlet surfaces, being the last three fixed with respect to the absolute
reference frame. After that we obtain a conformal mesh, dense enough to guarantee reliable results in a
two-dimensional simulation, with 250000 nodes and a y+ bounded in a value range from 40 to 150 near the
blades wall.

The partition of the domain was needed to set up a Multiple Reference Frame model to reach the
solution and to assign proper boundary condition for a pressure-based solver. The Multiple Reference
Frame model (frozen rotor approach) allows to obtain a stationary approximation for a flow through
multiple zones, each one with different relative velocity, using the vector sum of absolute velocity and
rotational velocity in every zone.

As expected, relative velocity in the first rotor increase up to the throat section, and it’s easy to see that
there is no boundary layer separation, no vortices or any reverse flow. The steep increase of relative
velocity is crucial for a Ljungstrom Turbine: in fact this is the only positive contribution to Euler’s work, due
to the radial outflow configuration.

The relative velocity distribution in the second rotor confirms the expected behavior of the flow. It’s easy to
verify that there is no significant velocity drop past the outlet section: besides, it’s essential to point out
that the outlet surface beyond the second row is a fictitious surface, where the third row should be placed.

Static pressure contours guarantee a proper lift forces distribution, and validate the behavior of relative
velocity, offering a complete view of the flow in both rows.

CFD results are overall conformal to the one-dimensional design, and they support the feasibility of a
Ljungstrom Turbine for a micro ORC in a Waste Heat Recovery system powered by an internal combustion
engine, and the amount of recovered power encourages further studies. The maximization of the volume
flow rate appears to be critical in this particular application, in order to avoid manufacturing and fluid
dynamic issues due to the scarce blades height. For this reason, using low density fluids is suggested,
however a more dense fluid is still a reasonable choice, if supported by a very high mass flow rate, and a
lower specific heat.

Thank you for your kind attention. I would also like to thank my co-authors and the department of
mechanical and aerospace engineering, and of course professor Enrico Sciubba, who gave us the
opportunity to follow this project.

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