ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we show how the conclusions we arrived at in the first part and the tools we introduced in the second part can be used to improve the cycles of steam power plants.
After a reminder of these conclusions, we recall the main technological constraints to which these cycles are subject; then we present the gains brought to the Rankine cycle by reheat and regenerative cycles with open and closed feedwater heaters.
The exergy balances and plots in the (h, ln(P)) and entropy thermodynamic charts of these cycles show the relevance of these tools.
We then study the main variants of conventional steam power plants: supercritical cycles, binary cycles, cycles of pressurized water reactor (PWR) plants, and we end with organic Rankine cycles (ORC), which are an alternative to conventional cycles increasingly used when the temperature of the hot source decreases or the installed capacity is less than 10 MW.
