Organic Rankine Cycle

The organic Rankine cycle is a variation of the Rankine steam cycle that uses an organic, higher molecular mass working fluid whose boiling point is lower than water, letting it recover useful work from heat sources too cool to run a conventional steam turbine; the fluid is pumped to a boiler where it evaporates, expands through a turbine or similar device to produce work, condenses back to liquid, and the cycle repeats. Lucien Bronicki and Harry Zvi Tabor developed the modern technology in the late 1950s, building on naphtha fueled engines that had operated on similar principles as early as the 1890s. The technology is now used to recover waste heat from industrial processes and to generate power from biomass, geothermal and solar thermal heat sources, with more than 2.7 gigawatts of installed capacity across 698 identified plants worldwide.