Systematic Assessment of Combustion Turbine Inlet Air-Cooling Techniques

Abstract

The current study is centered on assessing the benefits of incorporating combustion turbine inlet air-cooling systems into a reference combustion turbine plant, which is based on a simple cycle under base load mode. Actual climatic conditions of a selected site were examined thoroughly to identify the different governing weather patterns. The main performance characteristics of both refrigerative and evaporative cooling systems were explored by examining the effect of several parameters including inlet air temperature, airflow-to-turbine output ratio, coefficient of performance (for refrigerative cooling systems), and evaporative degree hours (for evaporative cooling systems). The impact of these parameters was presented against the annual gross energy increase, average heat rate reduction, cooling load requirements and net power increase. Finally, a feasibility design chart was constructed to outline the economic returns of employing a refrigerative cooling unit against different prescribed inlet air temperature values using a wide range of combustion turbine mass flow rates.