Ambient Temperature Impact on Micro Gas Turbines: Experimental Characterization

Abstract

In the panorama of gas turbines for energy production, a great relevance is given to performance impact of the ambient conditions. Under the influence of ambient temperature, humidity and other factors, the engine performance is subject to consistent variations. This is true for large power plants as well as small engines. In Combined Cycle configuration, variation in performance are mitigated by the HRSG and the bottoming steam cycle. In a small scale system, such as a micro gas turbine, the influence on the electric and thermal power productions is strong as well, and is not mitigated by a bottoming cycle. This work focuses on the Turbec T100 micro gas turbine and its performance through a series of operations with different ambient temperatures. The goal is to characterize the engine performance deriving simple correlations for the influence of ambient temperature on performance, at different electrical loads. The newly obtained experimental data are compared with previous performance curves on a modified machine, to capture the differences due to hardware degradation in time. An active management of the compressor inlet temperature may be developed in the future, basing on the analysis reported here.

Dynamic simulation of a combined cycle for power plant flexibility enhancement

“…In the presented context, the PUMP-HEAT project [8] studies two main layouts of Heat Pump and Energy storage in CC. The first layout considered, a Power Oriented one, conditions the Gas Turbine inlet temperature [9] to adapt the electricity production to the market demand. The second layout studies the integration of Heat Pump and Latent Heat storage in Cogenerative CC to extract heat from condensate to provide additional heat to District Network.…”