A Review and a Study on Their Influence on The Performance of Simple Cycle Power Plants- 19th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering

A Review and a Study on Their Influence on The Performance of Simple Cycle Power Plants

In simple cycle power plants based on gas turbines, the power output is considerably reduced with the increase in ambient temperature. Many technologies of power augmentation for gas turbines have been proposed along the past few decades, and several systems have already been applied in real plants. Power augmentation techniques are based on the philosophy of increasing the mass flow rate which goes through the gas turbine, which, in turn, increases the gas turbine power output. The increase in the mass flow rate is achieved either by reducing the gas turbine inlet temperature or by direct injection of working fluid. The goal of this paper is to give a comprehensive review of the different technologies of power augmentation available today for gas turbines, as well as to evaluate and to select the best alternative of power augmentation for a specific simple cycle power plant in Brazil. The calculations are carried out using an in-house computer program, called the Power Augmentation Technologies (PAT) model, developed for thermal performance modeling and financial analysis. In order to validate the computational model developed, the authors carried out comparisons between the results obtained with this model and data obtained from literature. Results of a case study, corresponding to a specific simple cycle power plant, show that significant improvements in power output and thermal efficiency can be achieved through the use of all the power augmentation technologies analyzed. In particular, considering the net present value as the main investment economic indicator determining the implementation of a project of this category, the results show that the power augmentation systems based on refrigerating processes and injection of steam in the combustor are the most suitable for this specific simple cycle power plant.

César Celis, Vinicius Pimenta de Avellar, Sandro Barros Ferreira, Sergio Leal Braga