Investigation on humidified gas turbine cycles with Maisotsenko-cycle-based air saturator

Abstract

The urge for more energy-efficient power plant systems triggered the design for more advanced power cycle designs. The current simple cycle gas turbine shows its advantage on cost but does not fully exploit the energy available in the flue gas. In this paper, two more efficient humidified gas turbine cycles were investigated. Type 1 was a hybrid design which combined an indirect evaporative cooler with a Maisotsenko cycle and Type 2 a conventional indirect evaporative cooler as air saturator. The simulation results indicated how the operating conditions such as pressure ratio and air flow changed with the designs. Both humidified gas turbine cycle systems offered better system efficiencies than a conventional gas turbine system with recuperator and the application of Maisotsenko cycle based air saturator could further improve the gas turbine cycle efficiency. Parametric studies were also conducted which highlighted the effects of water injection rate and part-load ratio on the comparative performances of the different humidified gas turbine cycle designs.