Sustainable energy development in power generation by using green inlet-air cooling technologies with gas turbine engines

摘要

This paper studies the different greening techniques of inlet air cooling and compares their effects on performance, especially power, efficiency, fuel consumption, and condensable water. A comparison between four air cooling techniques, namely, mechanical chillers, absorption chillers, evaporative cooling and fogging systems was performed on a gas turbine. The performance characteristics were examined for a set of design and operational variables including ambient temperature, relative humidity, compressor pressure ratio, and turbine inlet temperature. The absorption chiller is a single-stage vapor absorption refrigeration system using water-lithium bromide (H2O/LiBr) as the working fluid, where the generator and the absorber have fixed temperatures with variation in the heat load (evaporative cooling load) that produces the gas turbine inlet air temperature value of 5A degrees C. The analysis showed that the evaporative cooling enhanced the power by up to 8.7% and efficiency by up to 3.3%. On the other hand, the fogging system enhanced the power by up to 9.5% and the efficiency by up to 3.5%. The mechanical chiller reduced the temperature by 20 to 45A degrees C; enhancing the net power by 7 to 24.3% and improving the efficiency by 2.4 to 18.8%, whereas the absorption chillers enhanced the net power by up to 12.1 to 37.3% and improved the efficiency by up to 31.5%.