Today's Potential
The Ericsson cycle (and the similar Brayton cycle) receives renewed interest today to extract power from the exhaust heat of gas (and producer gas) engines and solar concentrators. An important advantage of the Ericsson cycle over the widely known Stirling engine is often not recognized: the volume of the heat exchanger does not adversely affect the efficiency. For medium and large engines the cost of valves can be small compared to this advantage. Turbocompressor plus turbine implementations seem favorable in the MWe range, positive displacement compressor plus turbine for Nx100 kWe power, and positive displacement compressor+expander below 100 kW. With high temperature hydraulic fluid, both the compressor and the expander can be liquid ring pump even up to 400°C, with rotating casing for best efficiency.
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