Numerical Study of a Micro Gas Turbine Integrated With a Supercritical CO2 Brayton Cycle Turbine

Abstract

The primary need of reducing pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions has led to new energy scenarios. The interest of research community is mainly focused on the development of energy systems based on renewable resources and energy storage systems and smart energy grids. In the latter case small scale energy systems can become of interest as nodes of distributed energy systems. In this context micro gas turbines (MGT) can play a key role thanks to their flexibility and a strategy to increase their overall efficiency is to integrate gas turbines with a bottoming cycle. In this paper the authors analyze the possibility to integrate a MGT with a super critical CO2 Brayton cycle turbine (sCO2 GT) as a bottoming cycle (BC). A 0D thermodynamic analysis is used to highlight opportunities and critical aspects also by a comparison with another integrated energy system in which the waste heat recovery (WHR) is obtained by the adoption of an organic Rankine cycle (ORC). While ORC is widely used in case of middle and low temperature of the heat source, s-CO2 BC is a new method in this field of application. One of the aim of the analysis is to verify if this choice can be comparable with ORC for this operative range, with a medium-low value of exhaust gases and very small power values. The studied MGT is a Turbec T100P.