Data collection, simulation and design of a waste heat energy conversion system

This paper presents the design of a hardware-in-the loop simulation of the Marnoch Thermal Energy Conversion (MTEC) system. The simulation has been designed using MATLAB and Simulink based on data acquired with a National Instruments data acquistion device and a Siemens programmable logic controller. This simulation is designed to allow design and evaluation of increasingly complex versions of the MTEC in which additional tank pairs can be added easily within the simulation to evaluate improvements that result for efficiency and power output. The goal of the system simulation is to test controller designs and to allow them to be used in both software-and hardware-in-the-loop simulations and as a put hardware system. The simulation consists of mechanical simulations of valves, pistons, and other devices, and thermodynamic and mass flow models of the pressure and heating/cooling systems of the MTEC. The resulting simulation is based on data collected from a four-tank MTEC prototype system.