The humid air turbine (HAT) cycle is a novel advanced gas turbine cycle. However, the conventional HAT cycle has many insufficiencies considering combined heat and power generation, water recovery and exhausts emission with low temperature. This study deals with these problems by integrating absorption heat pumps into the HAT cycle. Six types of absorption heat pumps, including the single stage open cycle absorption heat transformer (connect to the HAT cycle with simple and complex manner respectively), the two stage open cycle absorption heat transformer, the open cycle absorption heat pump with the single pressure, the closed cycle two stage absorption heat transformer and the closed cycle absorption heat pump, are incorporated into the HAT cycle. The integrated systems are simulated. The results indicate that while the electrical efficiency of the original HAT cycle is 56.48%, the cycle efficiencies of the above-mentioned integrated cycles are 50.53%, 55.15%, 51.07%, 46.88%, 57.52% and 46.25%, respectively. Water recovery can be achieved in each integrated system although the recovery effects are quite different. For the open systems, the water recovery levels depend on the pressure difference of the gas and the water. Full water recovery can be realized and the temperature of the exhaust gas can be kept high. The water recovery levels of the closed systems relate to the thermal capacity of the exhaust gas, and the emission of the low temperature exhaust gas is difficult. From the point of view of the combined heat and power generation, the temperature of the exhaust gas does not influence the quantity of the heat supply. Three integrated systems can be applied for the combined heat and power generation, the heat and power efficiency are 62.85%, 76.77% and 63.83% respectively. In general, the advantages of the HAT cycle combined with the absorption heat pump system are verified in the present paper.
Open cycle heat pump development for local resource use
