Abstract
The economic competitiveness of the energy market drives thermal power plant designers and oper-
ators to maximize the thermal efficiency of their power production cycles. The steam Rankine cycle is
common to all nuclear power plants in the United States. A Rankine cycle is modeled in Aspen HYSYS
and additional logic is used in the model to develop an optimization algorithm which will determine the
expected thermal efficiency of the complete cycle based on user input parameters. The results are com-
pared to work previously performed via manual optimization and show that the optimization algorithm
performs better in most cases while requiring considerably less time to solve. The user is instructed
on good practices for improving the efficiency further and suggested applications of the algorithm are
provided.