A Supercritical CO₂ Waste Heat Recovery System Design for a Diesel Generator for Nuclear Power Plant Application

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

There are difficulties to identify some references. The author should try to cite published papers if possible instead of using internal reports which are normally available for readers.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is a well done, case study using a first law analysis of a waste heat recovery design in order to increase the power output from back diesel generators that would be used in emergency situations, as I understand the introduction.  The authors clearly argue that the efficiency of the bottoming cycle is the critical parameter, but should be viewed in terms of the waste heat recovery factor and the power output.  This is a significant point that the thermal community needs to understand.  The interest in the paper is the completeness of the analysis, the unique setting and that the design procedure followed by the authors could be used in other situations.

The authors do an adequate presentation of describing the in house, proprietary  codes used in the analysis.  It would improve the paper if they could refer to a benchmark case for these codes to indicate their accuracy.

There was no cost analysis done, but the authors clearly indicate that the volume of the system is most critical design parameter.  The final solution is consistent with this view.  A clear statement to this effect would improve the paper.

The optimization procedure used to identify the final solution is acceptable and is based only on the first law analysis.  The paper would be of much more interest if the second law had been used, especially to base the value of the flow split using the exergy destruction as the optimization variable.

It also would be of interest if the authors had related the CO₂ emission from the diesel generator per total power output.  THis is another significant parameter for using waste heat recovery systems.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf