Parametric study of power turbine for diesel engine waste heat recovery

Abstract

Turbocompounding is a promising technology to recover waste heat from the exhaust and reduce fuel consumption for internal combustion engine. The design of a power turbine plays a key role in turbocompound engine performance.This paper presents a set of parametric studies of power turbine performed on a turbocompound diesel engine by means of turbine through-flow model developed by the authors. This simulation model was verified and validated using engine performance test data and achieved reasonable accuracy. The paper first analyzed the influence of three key geometrical parameters (blade height, blade radius and nozzle exit blade angle) on turbine expansion ratio and engine fuel consumptions. After that, the impacts of the geometrical parameters on power distribution, air mass flow rate and exhaust temperature were analyzed. Results showed that these parameters had significant effects on engine BSFC and power. At high engine speeds, there existed an optimum value of geometry parameter to obtain the lowest BSFC. At low engine speeds, the engine BSFC kept increasing or decreasing continuously as the geometry parameters changed. Research also found that the engine BSFC was most sensitive to the nozzle exit blade angle, which should be considered carefully during the design process. This paper provides a useful method for matching and designing of a power turbine for turbocompound engine.