Improvement design and performance assessment of combined cooling and power system using CO2 for waste heat recovery

•A novel CO2 based CCP for waste heat recovery is proposed.•Multi-objective optimizations among three CO2 based CCPs are conducted.•Comparative studies and exergy analyses are performed for these CCPs.•Proposed CCP can notably reduce exergy destructions in recuperators and cooler. Waste heat recovery (WHR) is an efficient approach to reducing fossil fuel consumptions and carbon dioxide emissions. In shipboards, gas turbine exhaust can be recovered to simultaneously produce power and cooling for meeting the actual need of marine. The supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) power cycles and transcritical carbon dioxide (tCO2) refrigeration cycles have many advantages of compact layout, high efficiency, and environmentally friendly property. Accordingly, combined cooling and power systems (CCPs) integrating sCO2 power cycle with tCO2 refrigeration cycle are considered as competitive and promising WHR systems. However, a large space is still left for CCP to improve its overall performance. In this study, a novel CCP is proposed based on two traditional CCPs. Mathematical models are developed based on the software MATLAB to conduct quantitative parametric analyses, three-objective optimizations and exergy analyses on these systems. The results indicate that compared with two traditional systems, the proposed system can enhance net power output by 40.185% and 35.743% while obtaining a comparable refrigeration capacity and total product unit cost. Exergy analysis indicates that the maximum exergy destructions occur in recuperators and cooler, and the proposed system can significantly reduce exergy destructions in these components compared with two traditional systems.