The supercritical compressed regenerative process can significantly enhance the regeneration heat and thermal efficiency of the Rankine cycle. It can be equivalent to a Brayton cycle that does not release heat to the environment. This results in the working fluid of the process operating under supercritical conditions. However

when the live steam pressure falls below the critical pressure in a supercritical or subcritical unit

the operation of this process becomes limited. This paper regards the supercritical compressed regenerative process as an independent cycle

removing the dependency of the working fluid on the Rankine cycle

thereby overcoming the application limitations of the process. Taking the 600 MW single-reheat subcritical coal-fired unit as a reference

thermodynamic calculations are performed on the supercritical compressed regenerative Rankine cycle (SRC)

transcritical compressed regenerative Rankine cycle (TRC)

and the reference Rankine cycle (RK) using the Ebsilon software. The results indicate that the thermal efficiency of SRC and TRC is consistently higher than that of RK under all operating conditions

with an improvement of up to 1.58%. Additionally

coal consumption is reduced by a maximum of 11.86 g/(kW·h)

demonstrating that the supercritical compressed regenerative process can significantly improve thermal efficiency under all operating conditions. According to exergy analysis

the exergy destruction ratio of the heat exchange process (boiler heat supply and regeneration) decreases after applying the supercritical compressed regenerative process. Specifically

the exergy destruction ratio of the boiler decreases

while that of the regeneration process increases

indicating an improved regeneration effect. Under 50% load

the exergy efficiency can be increased by up to 1.44%. The supercritical compressed regenerative Rankine cycle constructed in this paper ensures improvement in the heat of regeneration and thermal efficiency under all operating conditions

overcoming the efficiency improvement bottleneck of the Rankine cycle in extraction steam regeneration and providing a direction for the transformation of existing units.