The WISC Gas Turbine Engine

Autor: A. Radey Shouman, A. R. Shouman
Rok vydání: 1997
Předmět:
Zdroj: Volume 2: Coal, Biomass and Alternative Fuels; Combustion and Fuels; Oil and Gas Applications; Cycle Innovations.
DOI: 10.1115/97-gt-493
Popis: Combined gas turbine-steam turbine cycles have gained widespread acceptance as the most efficient utilization of the gas turbine for power generation, particularly for large power plants. In order to maximize the achievable thermal efficiency, more than one exhaust heat recovery boiler is used. The current trend is to use three boilers at three different operating pressures, which improves thermal efficiency but significantly increases the initial cost of the plant. There are advantages in replacing an exhaust heat recovery system using multiple boilers by a single heat exchanger in which the water side pressure is above the critical pressure of water; we shall refer to such a heat exchanger as a supercritical heat exchanger. The supercritical steam leaving the heat exchanger is expanded in a two phase turbine and then fed into the engine combustor. A condenser and a water treatment system are used to recover most of the water in the exhaust stream. A turbine system identical to the basic engine turbine system is added in parallel in order to allow for the operation with increased mass flow due to the steam injection. To achieve maximum efficiency such a turbine should be provided with variable area nozzles. With this arrangement, it becomes possible to inject sufficient steam to produce stoichiometric combustion at the desired turbine inlet temperature. We shall refer to this cycle as the Water Injected Stoichiometric Combustion (WISC) gas turbine cycle. The various components described above can be added to any existing gas turbine engine to change it to the WISC configuration. The WISC engine offers significant economical advantages. The specific power output per pound of air for the WISC engine is more than five times that of the basic engine, the thermal efficiency is 75% higher than that of the basic engine. This produces a significant reduction in the initial investment in the plant as well as its operating expenses.
Databáze: OpenAIRE