Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Solar Thermal Geothermal Hybrid System With A Bottoming Supercritical Organic Rankine Cycle, Francesca Moloney

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Climate change has spurred an interest in renewable energy. Many renewable energy technologies are intermittent, such as solar energy, or are dependent on transient conditions such as the ambient temperature in the case of geothermal energy. While solar thermal energy is able to achieve high temperatures and efficiencies, geothermal energy is limited by its lower temperatures which results in low conversion efficiency. There is an opportunity to create a hybrid system using both solar thermal and geothermal energy to improve their stand-alone performance.

In the literature, solar-geothermal hybrid systems are limited by the temperature of the solar field and the …