A Compound Cycle for Power Generation by Utilizing Residual Heat of Flue Gas in Electric Steelmaking Process

Electric furnace short process steelmaking is one of the most important steelmaking methods in the world today, and the waste heat recovery potential of electric furnace flue gas is huge. The research on the recovery of electric furnace flue gas waste heat is of great significance. In order to make better use of this part of the heat, in this paper, a compound cycle of nitrogen Brayton cycle as a first-order cycle and toluene transcritical Rankine cycle as a second-order cycle is proposed to recover waste heat from furnace flue gas in steelmaking process for power generation. A mathematical model was established with the net output power as the objective function and the initial expansion pressure, the final expansion pressure, the initial expansion temperature and the initial pressure of the second cycle as the independent variables. The effect of multivariate on the net output power of the waste heat power generation cycle is studied, and then, the optimal parameters of the compound cycle are determined. The results show that under the general electric furnace steelmaking process, the power generation efficiency of this new cycle can be increased by 21.02% compared with the conventional cycle.