Many programs have been in use for accurate evaluation of the efficiency of thermal systems and for their optimal design. Cyclepad is a good example. It has been developed for an analysis and the optimal design of different thermodynamic cycles.
However, Cyclepad has the disadvantage of needing the input and output of each computational module to be single phase only. Therefore, it failed to support accurate analyses of systems using wet steam and accurate calculation of the thermal properties of the working fluid at the transition points.
In addition to Cyclepad, some other programs for optimizing a second-order system using different optimization algorithms have also been developed, but they have not proved to be useful.
Pak Myong Guk, an institute head at the Faculty of Thermal Engineering, has proposed an improved random tunneling algorithm (RTA) to effectively solve a constrained mixed-variable global optimization problem, and based on it, he has conducted a thermal sequence efficiency analysis of the Rankine cycle and developed an optimization system for it.
With CAD technique introduced, the newly-developed program is effective for designing various Rankine cycles and for optimizing the efficiency of the Rankine cycle by applying improved IRTA.
For further details, you can refer to his paper “Development of Rankine Cycle Optimization CAD” in “Proceedings of KUTIC-2025”.