Sandhya Thantla

The earth is getting warmer! According to the NASA report, the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 0.87 degree Celsius since 1880, with the year 2015 recording the warmest of all. One of the major causative agents of this phenomenon of ‘Global warming’ is transportation, which is the source of undesirable CO2, NOx emissions.  Another important reason is that more than half of the fuel energy burnt does not contribute to vehicle propulsion. Instead, more than 30% of the fuel energy is released as waste heat into the environment. Recovering this exhaust waste heat would be a viable solution to conserve fuel, improve overall energy efficiency of the engine and to reduce the exhaust temperature as well. In order to achieve higher brake thermal efficiency, it is not only enough to recover the high energy exhaust but also to recover the low quality waste heat and utilize it effectively.

My research focus is on applying the concept of Rankine cycle/Organic Rankine Cycle to recover the potential waste heat from the internal combustion engines, a step towards eco-friendly transportation with more renewable energy sources and less fossil fuel in the future. The objective of this work is to be able to choose a suitable Expansion machine (that converts the waste heat into useful work) for waste heat recovery from a commerical Heavy-Duty engine.