This work is concerned with the investigation of thermal energy storage (TES) in relation to gas turbine inlet air cooling. The utilization of such techniques in simple gas turbine or combined cycle plants leads to improvement of flexibility and overall performance. Its scope is to review the various methods used to provide gas turbine power augmentation through inlet cooling and focus on the rising opportunities when these are combined with thermal energy storage. The results show that there is great potential in such systems due to their capability to provide intake conditioning of the gas turbine, decoupled from the ambient conditions. Moreover, latent heat TES have the strongest potential (compared to sensible heat TES) towards integrated inlet conditioning systems, making them a comparable solution to the more conventional cooling methods and uniquely suitable for energy production applications where stabilization of GT air inlet temperature is a requisite. Considering the system's thermophysical, environmental and economic characteristics, employing TES leads to more than 10% power augmentation.

This work is concerned with the investigation of thermal energy storage (TES) in relation to gas turbine inlet air cooling. The utilization of such techniques in simple gas turbine or combined cycle plants leads to improvement of flexibility and overall performance. Its scope is to review the various methods used to provide gas turbine power augmentation through inlet cooling and focus on the rising opportunities when these are combined with thermal energy storage. The results show that there is great potential in such systems due to their capability to provide intake conditioning of the gas turbine, decoupled from the ambient conditions. Moreover, latent heat TES have the strongest potential (compared to sensible heat TES) towards integrated inlet conditioning systems, making them a comparable solution to the more conventional cooling methods and uniquely suitable for energy production applications where stabilization of GT air inlet temperature is a requisite. Considering the system's thermophysical, environmental and economic characteristics, employing TES leads to more than 10% power augmentation.

The present paper investigates the performance of a Tesla disk turbine used as a turboexpander for small waste heat recovery applications. The geometry of the stator is slightly involuted and the admission of the fluid takes place through a two-convergent-nozzle configuration with supersonic flow conditions close to the nozzle outlet. Three cases with varying disk tip clearance are simulated for the entire operating range. The preliminary results suggest that a small decrease in the tip clearance can lead to a considerable increase in the performance of the turbine up to 57%. Specific adverse flow characteristics are analyzed: i) The circumferential extend of the supersonic region inside the stator, ii) flow asymmetry in the axis perpendicular to the flow and iii) flow reversal inside the rotor due to the local over-expansion close to the nozzles. The current simplified investigation is directed towards the improvement of Tesla turbines performance operating in the two-phase regime and under local supersonic conditions.