Baseline Airfoil Cooling Designs for a 5-10 MW Combined Heat and Power Turbine Application

Abstract

Abstract Industrial gas turbines are commonly used in steam combined heat and power (CHP) applications. Combined heat and power applications have significant environmental and economic benefits that are consistent with the goals of the U.S. Department of Energy. One area that is currently being studied includes the potential benefits of CHP turbine operation at higher turbine inlet temperatures. Although these benefits will be described briefly in this paper, the primary focus will address a means to achieve these performance benefits through improvements in airfoil cooling. Specifically, internal cooling concepts enabled by additive and hybrid manufacturing are of primary interest. This paper will describe the conventional cooling technologies that have been identified after a thorough review of public literature as a baseline for more detailed analysis and future testing. This effort is unique because the cooling features (i.e., leading edge, mid-chord, and trailing edge) are integrated together within an airfoil of realistic scale. The engineering models that have been developed to characterize the cooling performance for these baseline configurations will be described. It is believed that the cooling designs described in this paper are representative of gas turbines in the 5–10 MWe size range, but not identical to any commercial product. The present effort to establish a state-of-the-art cooling scheme is a first, and necessary, step in an on-going project to identify and test more advanced cooling concepts for CHP systems that are enabled by additive manufacturing.