Following the success of the previous two editions (ORC 2011 and ASME-ORC2013), we are delighted to announce the third edition of the International Seminar on ORC Power Systems to be held in Brussels from 12 to 14 October, 2015, hosted by the Ghent University and the University of Liege.
Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) power plants are gaining ever increasing interest as cost-effective sustainable energy systems. By using an appropriate organic working fluid in a Rankine thermodynamic cycle, ORC power plants are able to efficiently convert renewable energy sources into electricity. Their power capacity spans from a few kWe to a few MWe for a single unit, but multiple units in parallel can make up a multi megawatt power station. Among the multitude of applications of this technology, several stand out: ORC systems can be used to obtain electricity from geothermal reservoirs, biomass combustion and gasification, solar radiation, waste heat recovery from internal combustion engines and gas turbines, as well as a large variety of industrial processes discarding heat at low and moderate temperatures. The ORC market is growing at an impressive pace, with currently many hundreds of units of various sizes operating reliably for many years all over the world. Research and development in scientific and technical fields related to ORC technology is very active and growing, as the room for improvement is still large.