The paper aims to give an overview over the keystones of design of the turbomachine for a supercritical CO2 (sCO2) Brayton cycle. The described turbomachine is developed as part of a demonstration cycle on a laboratory scale with a low through flow. Therefore, the turbomachine is small and operates at high rotational speed. To give an overview on the development, the paper is divided into two parts regarding the aerodynamic and mechanical design. The aerodynamic design includes a detailed description on the steps from choosing an appropriate rotational speed to the design of the compressor impeller. For setting the rotational speed, the expected high windage losses are evaluated considering the reachable efficiencies of the compressor. The final impeller design includes a description of the blading development together with the final geometry parameters and calculated performance. The mechanical analysis shows the important considerations for building a turbomachine with integrated design of the three major components: turbine, alternator, and compressor (TAC). It includes different manufacturing techniques of the impellers, the bearing strategy, the sealing components, and the cooling of the generator utilizing the compressor leakage. Concluding the final design of the TAC is shown and future work on the machine is introduced.

Cyber-attacks on power assets can have disastrous consequences for individuals, regions, and whole nations. In order to respond to these threats, the assessment of power grids' and plants' cyber security can foster a higher degree of safety for the whole infrastructure dependent on power. Hitherto, we propose the use of attack simulations based on system architecture models. To reduce the effort of creating new attack graphs for each system of a given type, domain-specific attack languages may be employed. They codify common attack logics of the considered domain. Previously, MAL (the Meta Attack Language) was proposed, which serves as a framework to develop domain specific attack languages. We extend the tool set of MAL by developing an approach to model security domains in ArchiMate notation. Next, those models are used to create a MAL instance, which reflects the concepts modeled in ArchiMate. These instances serve as input to simulate attacks on certain systems. To show the applicability of our approach, we conduct two case studies in the power domain. On the one hand, we model a thermal power plant and possible attacks on it. On the other hand, we use the attack on the Ukrainian power grid for our case study.

This paper aims to give an understanding of an effect which stabilizes the inlet conditions of compressors for supercritical CO2 (sCO2) operating close to the critical point. The effect was observed during testing of the turbomachine within the sCO2-HeRo project, and is caused by the sCO2 real gas properties close to the pseudocritical line. Under theoretical consideration, strong gradients in the fluid properties around this line—dependent on the static temperature and pressure of sCO2—can result in strong variation of compressor performance and finally lead to unstable cycle behavior. However, this paper demonstrates reduced gradients in density at the compressor inlet when varying the cooling power and taking advantage of a stabilizing effect. The applicable range and the significance of this stabilizing effect depended on the cooler inlet temperature and pressure, and was used to evaluate the relevance for individual cycles. Controlling the cooling power and the measurement of the inlet density allowed control of the compressor inlet conditions equally well, independent of the operating point, even close to the critical point.

In the sCO2-HeRo project, the Chair of Turbomachinery at the University of Duisburg-Essen developed, built and tested a turbomachine with an integral design in which the compressor, generator and turbine are housed in a single hermetic casing. However, ball bearings limited operation because their lubricants were incompatible with supercritical CO2 (sCO2) and they had to operate in gaseous CO2 instead. To overcome this problem, the turbomachine was redesigned built and tested in the sCO2-4-NPP project. Instead of ball bearings, magnetic bearings are now used to operate the turbomachine with the entire rotor in sCO2. This paper presents the revised design, focusing on the usage of magnetic bearings. It also investigates whether the sCO2 limits the operating range. Test runs show that increasing the density and rotational speed results in greater deflection of the rotor and greater forces on the bearings. Measurements are also analyzed with respect to influence of the density increase on the destabilizing forces in the rotor–stator cavities. The conclusion is that for the operation of the turbomachine, the control parameters of the magnetic bearings must be adjusted not only to the rotor speed, but also to the fluid density. This enabled successful operation of the turbomachine, which reached a speed of about 40,000 rpm during initial tests in CO2.

No abstract