Techno-economic, environmental risk, and gas path analysis of intercooled recuperated turbofan engine

Abstract

The growing interest in the intercooled recuperated turbofan engine (IRT) reflects the push towards more fuel-efficient aero-engines. However, several additional questions are raised about the quantification of the benefits of IRT, the aftermath of fault propagation of IRT in life cycle, and the effects of extra heat exchangers volume on gas path analysis in IRT. In this study, a comprehensive assessment of techno-economic analysis based on the energy-exergy method is introduced to clarify the advance of IRT in comparison to the conventional cycle turbofan engine (CCTE). The results indicate that IRT decreases the fuel exergy flow and improves the exergy efficiency by approximately 23.53 % and 2.58 %, respectively. Furthermore, the techno-economic and environmental risks are evaluated to demonstrate the effect of fault propagation on engine performance by a succession of exergy-based environment and sustainability indicators during the engine’s life cycle. After the fault propagation, the environmental effect factor and sustainability index worsen by 4.70 % and 4.94 %, respectively. In addition, the proposed gas path analysis method could diagnose the concurrent faults of both intercooler and recuperator together with rotating components in real-time, even with sudden failure. The maximum diagnostic errors for steady-state conditions, transient conditions with constant fault, and transient conditions with sudden failure are lower than 0.052 %, 0.168 %, and 0.186 %, respectively. Correspondingly, the average calculation time is less than 0.0053, 0.0071, and 0.0074 s, respectively. Therefore, this study should be of value to practitioners wishing to investigate the intercooled recuperated turbofan engine in techno-economic, environmental risk, and gas path analysis aspects.