A Thermo-Environmental Evaluation of a Modified Combustion Gas Turbine Plant

Abstract

This paper reports the comprehensive thermodynamic modeling of a modified combustion gas turbine plant where Brayton refrigeration cycle was employed for inlet air cooling along with evaporative after cooling. Exergetic evaluation was combined with the emission computation to ascertain the effects of operating variables like extraction pressure ratio, extracted mass rate, turbine inlet temperature (TIT), ambient relative humidity, and mass of injected water on the thermo-environmental performance of the gas turbine cycle. Investigation of the proposed gas turbine cycle revealed an exergetic output of 33%, compared to 29% for base case. Proposed modification in basic gas turbine shows a drastic reduction in cycle's exergy loss from 24% to 3% with a considerable decrease in the percentage of local irreversibility of the compressor from 5% to 3% along with a rise in combustion irreversibility from 19% to 21%. The environmental advantage of adding evaporative after cooling to gas turbine cycle along with inlet air cooling can be seen from the significant reduction of NOx from 40 g/kg of fuel to 1 × 10−9 g/kg of fuel with the moderate increase of CO concentration from 36 g/kg of fuel to 99 g/kg of fuel when the fuel–air equivalence ratio reduces from 1.0 to 0.3. Emission assessment further reveals that the increase in ambient relative humidity from 20% to 80% causes a considerable reduction in NOx concentration from 9.5 to 5.8 g/kg of fuel while showing a negligible raise in CO concentration from 4.4 to 5.0 g/kg of fuel.