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Organic Rankine cycle turbogenerators are a viable option as stationary energy converters for external heat sources, in the low power range (from a fewkWup to a few MW). The fluid-dynamic design of organic Rankine cycle turbines can benefit from computational fluid dynamics tools which are capable of properly taking into account realgas effects occurring in the turbine, which typically expands in the nonideal-gas thermodynamic region. In addition, the potential efficiency increase offered by supercritical organic Rankine cycles, which entails even stronger real-gas effects, has not yet been exploited in current practice. In this paper, real-gas effects occurring in subcritical and supercritical organic Rankine cycle nozzles have been investigated. Two-dimensional Euler simulations of an existing axial organic Rankine cycle stator nozzle are carried out using a computational fluid dynamics code, which is linked to an accurate thermodynamic model for the working fluid octamethyltrisiloxane C8H24O2Si3). The cases analyzed include the expansions starting from actual subcritical conditions, that is, the design point and part-load operation, and three expansions starting from supercritical conditions. Results of the simulations of the existing nozzle for current operating conditions can be used to refine its design. Moreover, the simulations of the nozzle expansions starting from supercritical conditions show that a nozzle geometry with a much higher exit-to-throat area ratio is required to obtain an efficient expansion. Other peculiar characteristics of supercritical expansions such as low sound speed and velocity, high density, and mass flow rate, are discussed

This paper presents a new class of Bethe-Zel'dovich-Thompson fluids, which are expected to exhibit nonclassical gasdynamic behavior in the single-phase vapor region. These are the linear and cyclic siloxanes, light silicon oils currently employed as working fluids in organic Rankine cycle turbines. State-of-the-art multiparameter equations of state are used to describe the thermodynamic properties of siloxanes and to compute the value of the fundamental derivative of gasdynamics ⌫, whose negative sign is the herald of nonclassical gasdynamics. Siloxane fluids starting from D 6 and cyclic siloxanes of greater complexity, and MD 3 M and linear siloxanes of greater complexity are predicted to exhibit a thermodynamic region in which ⌫ is negative and hence nonclassical wavefields are admissible. As an exemplary case, a nonclassical rarefaction shock wave propagating in fluid D 6 is studied to demonstrate the possibility of using siloxane fluids in nonclassical gasdynamic applications and to experimentally verify the existence of nonclassical wavefields in the vapor phase. The sensitivity of the present results to the considered thermodynamic model of the fluid is also briefly discussed.