Study of a Gas Turbine Cycle to Boost the Autonomy of Electric Cars

Abstract

The greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector are the primary cause of climate change. As a result, many studies have developed new powertrains with reduced CO2 emissions for the automotive industry. The gas turbine cycle coupled to an alternator is an autonomy booster for series hybrid electric vehicles. Many gas turbine configurations are proposed in the literature to obtain the highest cycle efficiency. This paper suggests a new architecture offering higher efficiency than all the previous cycles. The two-step methodology consists at first of a sensibility analysis using VBA and Refprop to determine the optimal operating conditions in terms of higher efficiency. The selected cycle consists of two compression stages with an intercooler, a combustion chamber, a cooled hot pressure turbine, an uncooled low-pressure turbine, and a recuperator. The efficiency of this design reaches 51.39%, which approximately matches the designs compared in the literature, but is more compact because it does not require a second combustion chamber.