Performance enhancement of gas turbine units by retrofitting with inlet air cooling technologies (IACTs): an hour-by-hour simulation study

Abstract

In the present research, a yearly performance of a gas turbine unit and the unit with the added inlet air cooling technologies (IACTs) was investigated in terms of performance and output power using TRNSYS software. The existing system was retrofitted with five different IACTs, namely Config. A: existing system integrated with an evaporative media, Config. B: existing system integrated with a fogging unit, Config. C: existing system integrated with a mechanical chiller, Config. D: existing system integrated with an absorption chiller, and Config. E: existing system integrated with a thermal energy storage. The configurations were examined to determine the most proper configuration. The study revealed that Config. C was superior and was the optimal configuration for the gas turbine unit and it was recommended for the existing system. The study showed that Config. C was capable of enhancing the yearly output power with about 10.62%. After determining the proper configuration, a method benefiting a passive energy technology of heat pipe structure was also proposed. In the proposed method, a water-to-air heat pipe heat exchanger (HPHX) consisting of single heat pipe tubes was planned to be added to Config. C as a pre-cooling equipment. To this end, the mathematical performance of the water-to-air HPHX was derived to be defined in TRNSYS studio. It was shown that a considerable amount of energy could be obtained after adding the water-to-air HPHX to Config. C. The exergy analysis also proved that application of IACT improves the exergy efficiency of the whole system. Keywords Gas turbine units • Inlet air cooling technologies (IACT) • Output power • Performance • TRNSYS List of symbols A Heat transfer area (m 2) a Tube distance in a row in Eq. (39) (mm) b Distance between the tubes in two successive rows in Eq. (39) (mm) bbl Barrel of oil C Heat capacity (J/s K) C pa Specific heat of air at constant pressure (kJ/ kg K) C pg Specific heat of turbine outlet gases at constant pressure (kJ/kg K) C 1 Constant in Eq. (21) (0.535) * M. Ahmadzadehtalatapeh

Gas turbine suitable for the ambient conditions prevailing in Arab Gulf countries: A prognostic analysis

“…e) The air and the products of combustion behaves like ideal gases [52] The equations used for calculating the performance of the selected GTPG was as follows. Temperature of the air coming out of the cooling unit [17,52,114,116].…”

“…The discharge pressure from the combustion chamber was calculated based on the pre-defined combustor pressure drop (Pcpd) [9,52,53,68,116].…”

“…𝑚𝑚 𝑡𝑡 = 𝑚𝑚 𝑎𝑎𝑖𝑖𝑎𝑎 + 𝑚𝑚 𝑓𝑓 (11) net power obtained from the gas turbine is given by [11,49,52,53,68,116].…”

“…The thermal efficiency of the gas turbine was determined by the following equation [52,53,55,57,68,116].…”

Performance improvement of cogeneration plants in hot arid regions via sustainable turbine inlet air cooling technologies: An energy‐water nexus comparative case study

“…Furthermore, additional assumptions are also required to perform the financial analysis including the project lifecycle and salvage value of the cooling systems. In this study, the payback period of coupling IAC systems in the conceptual plant representing AZN is calculated based on a fixed investment cost per cooling kW added in the top cycle for EC and AR systems respectively 51 . The additional power added in the top cycle as a result of IAC coupling varies considerably with the hourly ambient conditions and therefore the maximum value based on the simulation results was considered in this study.…”