A Novel Refrigeration System For Refrigerated Trucks Incorporating Organic Rankine Cycle

An integrated refrigeration system combined an Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) and a vapor compression refrigerating (VCR) system is proposed for the refrigerated trucks. In which the ORC system is designed to recover the exhaust heat from the engine and the VCR system is employed to provide cooling capacity to keep goods under desired thermal conditions, and the VCR system is totally driven by the electricity generated in the ORC system. In this work, the thermal and economic performance for a 4.2m length refrigerated truck is investigated through comparing with a conventional refrigeration system. The results indicate that the proposed system holds advantages regarding the overall thermal and economic performance compared with the conventional one. It is verified that ORC system can guarantee the amount of the electricity for VCR system. Moreover, diesel consumption can be reduced and the cost will be cut down during refrigerated transport with the proposed system.