ABSTRACT
Binary geothermal power generation using geothermal energy refers to the organic Rankine cycle that does not cause air pollution as it uses working fluids with low boiling points under atmospheric pressure (e.g., iso-pentane or iso-butane) in the below 150°C geothermal temperature (Moreijah, 2012). Waste heat sources are available from thermal and nuclear power plants (Namjin Kim, 2007), industrial wastewater, and waste heat from ships (Jongkwon Kim, 2014), among others, and are currently under research. In South Korea, OTEC is being studied by the Ocean Water Plant Research Center of the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering under the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology located in Goseong, Gangwon-do. The center is studying the development of element technologies through the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries project called “Development of an Ocean Deep Water Energy Utilization Technology.” The project, initiated in 2010, successfully designed, built, and operated 100 W OTEC mock-up equipment in 2011. In 2013, the South Korean OTEC technology achieved many improvements, keeping up with the world’s best technology by designing, manufacturing, and successfully operating a 20 kW OTEC plant (Hosaeng Lee, 2013). Based on this OTEC technology, high-temperature-difference OTEC including a multi-stage geothermal cycle is currently being
1 INTRODUCTION
As the indiscriminate development in the past led to environmental destruction and resource depletion, the human race now cannot help considering the environment and resources. As a solution to this problem, new renewable energy sources are being developed and studied. Among them, ocean energy is a very stable and infinite clean energy resource. As the sea accounts for three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, a considerable amount of the solar energy that reaches the earth is absorbed by the sea (Taebeom Seo, 2001).
