Advanced turbine systems program -- Conceptual design and product development. Final report

Abstract

This Final Technical Report presents the accomplishments on Phase 2 of the Advanced Turbine Systems (ATS). The ATS is an advanced, natural gas fired gas turbine system that will represent a major advance on currently available industrial gas turbines in the size range of 1--20 MW. This report covers a market-driven development. The Market Survey reported in Section 5 identified the customer`s performance needs. This market survey used analyses performed by Solar turbine Incorporated backed up by the analyses done by two consultants, Research Decision Consultants (RDC) and Onsite Energy Corporation (Onsite). This back-up was important because it is the belief of all parties that growth of the ATS will depend both on continued participation in Solar`s traditional oil and gas market but to a major extent on a new market. This new market is distributed electrical power generation. Difficult decisions have had to be made to meet the different demands of the two markets. Available resources, reasonable development schedules, avoidance of schedule or technology failures, probable acceptance by the marketplace, plus product cost, performance and environmental friendliness are a few of the complex factors influencing the selection of the Gas Fired Advanced Turbine System described in Section 3. Section 4 entitled ``Conversion to Coal`` was a task which addresses the possibility of a future interruption to an economic supply of natural gas. System definition and analysis is covered in Section 6. Two major objectives were met by this work. The first was identification of those critical technologies that can support overall attainment of the program goals. Separate technology or component programs were begun to identify and parameterize these technologies and are described in Section 7. The second objective was to prepare parametric analyses to assess performance sensitivity to operating variables and to select design approaches to meet the overall program goals.