| Summary: | One or more isothermal heating process was introduced to modify single and regenerative Brayton cycles by some scholars, which effectively improved the thermal efficiency and significantly reduced the emissions. To analyze and optimize the performance of this type of Brayton cycle, a regenerative modified Brayton cycle with an isothermal heating process is established in this paper based on finite time thermodynamics. The isothermal pressure drop ratio is variable. The irreversibilities of the compressor, turbine and all heat exchangers are considered in the cycle, and the heat reservoirs are variable-temperature ones. The function expressions of four performance indexes; that is, dimensionless power output, thermal efficiency, dimensionless power density and dimensionless ecological function are obtained. With the dimensionless power density as the optimization objective, the heat conductance distributions among all heat exchangers and the thermal capacitance rate matching among the working fluid and heat reservoir are optimized. Based on the NSGA-II algorithm, the cycle’s double-, triple- and quadruple-objective optimization are conducted with the total pressure ratio and the heat conductance distributions among heat exchangers as design variables. The optimal value is chosen from the Pareto frontier by applying the LINMAP, TOPSIS and Shannon entropy methods. The results show that when the pressure ratio in the compressor is less than 12.0, it is beneficial to add the regenerator to improve the cycle performance; when the pressure ratio is greater than 12.0, adding the regenerator will reduce the cycle performance. For single-objective optimization, the four performance indexes could be maximized under the optimal pressure ratios, respectively. When the pressure ratio is greater than 9.2, the cycle is simplified to a closed irreversible simple modified Brayton cycle with one isothermal heating process and coupled to variable-temperature heat reservoirs. Therefore, when the regenerator is used, the range of pressure ratio is limited, and a suitable pressure ratio should be selected. The triple objective (dimensionless power output, dimensionless power density and dimensionless ecological function) optimization’ deviation index gained by LINMAP or TOPSIS method is the smallest. The optimization results gained in this paper could offer some new pointers for the regenerative Brayton cycles’ optimal designs.
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