Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.
The combined gas/steam turbine cycle power plants offer an
efficient and environment friendly system for electric power
generation. However the power output from a gas turbine
decreases significantly with increase in ambient temperature.
This is a serious condition especially in hot climatic
environments. Best method to tackle this situation is to
condition the inlet air to the gas turbine using innovative
techniques for augmenting power and efficiency improvement.
This paper illustrates the influence of various inlet air
conditioning techniques. A computational model of the
Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plant was developed
and applied to a typical 350 MW Combined Cycle Power Plant
(CCPP), operational in Kerala, India. The model is based on
thermodynamics, heat transfer and psychrometric principles.
With the help of this model, a parametric analysis of combined
cycle gas turbine plant for various temperatures and humidity
with swirl flash technology was carried out and results plotted.
Evaporative cooling and refrigerated inlet cooling techniques
were compared with the swirl flash technology to establish that
the swirl flash is superior to other methods in efficiency and
power enhancement.
