scholarly journals Efficiency Enhancement of Gas Turbine Systems with Air Injection Driven by Natural Gas Turboexpanders

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 10994
Author(s):  
Ali Rafiei Sefiddashti ◽  
Reza Shirmohammadi ◽  
Fontina Petrakopoulou

The fuel source of many simple and combined-cycle power plants usually comes from a nearby natural gas transmission pipeline at a pressure from 50 to over 70 bar. The use of a turboexpander instead of throttling equipment offers a promising alternative to regulate the pressure of natural gas introduced to the power plant. Specifically, it helps recover part of the available energy of the compressed gas in the transmission pipeline, increase the power output and efficiency of the gas turbine system, and decrease the fuel use and harmful emissions. In this paper, the addition of such a turboexpander in a gas pressure-reduction station is studied. The recovered power is then used to drive the compression of extra air added to the combustion chamber of a heavy-duty gas turbine. The performance of this configuration is analyzed for a wide range of ambient temperatures using energy and exergy analyses. Fuel energy recovered in this way increases the output power and the efficiency of the gas turbine system by a minimum of 2.5 MW and 0.25%, respectively. The exergy efficiency of the gas turbine system increases by approximately 0.36% and the annual CO2 emissions decrease by 1.3% per MW.

2000 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Lozza ◽  
P. Chiesa

This paper discusses novel schemes of combined cycle, where natural gas is chemically treated to remove carbon, rather than being directly used as fuel. Carbon conversion to CO2 is achieved before gas turbine combustion. The first part of the paper discussed plant configurations based on natural gas partial oxidation to produce carbon monoxide, converted to carbon dioxide by shift reaction and therefore separated from the fuel gas. The second part will address methane reforming as a starting reaction to achieve the same goal. Plant configuration and performance differs from the previous case because reforming is endothermic and requires high temperature heat and low operating pressure to obtain an elevated carbon conversion. The performance estimation shows that the reformer configuration has a lower efficiency and power output than the systems addressed in Part I. To improve the results, a reheat gas turbine can be used, with different characteristics from commercial machines. The thermodynamic efficiency of the systems of the two papers is compared by an exergetic analysis. The economic performance of natural gas fired power plants including CO2 sequestration is therefore addressed, finding a superiority of the partial oxidation system with chemical absorption. The additional cost of the kWh, due to the ability of CO2 capturing, can be estimated at about 13–14 mill$/kWh.


Author(s):  
Vikram Muralidharan ◽  
Matthieu Vierling

Power generation in south Asia has witnessed a steep fall due to the shortage of natural gas supplies for power plants and poor water storage in reservoirs for low hydro power generation. Due to the current economic scenario, there is worldwide pressure to secure and make more gas and oil available to support global power needs. With constrained fuel sources and increasing environmental focus, the quest for higher efficiency would be imminent. Natural gas combined cycle plants operate at a very high efficiency, increasing the demand for gas. At the same time, countries may continue to look for alternate fuels such as coal and liquid fuels, including crude and residual oil, to increase energy stability and security. In over the past few decades, the technology for refining crude oil has gone through a significant transformation. With the advanced refining process, there are additional lighter distillates produced from crude that could significantly change the quality of residual oil used for producing heavy fuel. Using poor quality residual fuel in a gas turbine to generate power could have many challenges with regards to availability and efficiency of a gas turbine. The fuel needs to be treated prior to combustion and needs a frequent turbine cleaning to recover the lost performance due to fouling. This paper will discuss GE’s recently developed gas turbine features, including automatic water wash, smart cooldown and model based control (MBC) firing temperature control. These features could significantly increase availability and improve the average performance of heavy fuel oil (HFO). The duration of the gas turbine offline water wash sequence and the rate of output degradation due to fouling can be considerably reduced.


2006 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mun Roy Yap ◽  
Ting Wang

Biomass can be converted to energy via direct combustion or thermochemical conversion to liquid or gas fuels. This study focuses on burning producer gases derived from gasifying biomass wastes to produce power. Since the producer gases are usually of low calorific values (LCV), power plant performance under various operating conditions has not yet been proven. In this study, system performance calculations are conducted for 5MWe power plants. The power plants considered include simple gas turbine systems, steam turbine systems, combined cycle systems, and steam injection gas turbine systems using the producer gas with low calorific values at approximately 30% and 15% of the natural gas heating value (on a mass basis). The LCV fuels are shown to impose high compressor back pressure and produce increased power output due to increased fuel flow. Turbine nozzle throat area is adjusted to accommodate additional fuel flows to allow the compressor to operate within safety margin. The best performance occurs when the designed pressure ratio is maintained by widening nozzle openings, even though the turbine inlet pressure is reduced under this adjustment. Power augmentations under four different ambient conditions are calculated by employing gas turbine inlet fog cooling. Comparison between inlet fog cooling and steam injection using the same amount of water mass flow indicates that steam injection is less effective than inlet fog cooling in augmenting power output. Maximizing steam injection, at the expense of supplying the steam to the steam turbine, significantly reduces both the efficiency and the output power of the combined cycle. This study indicates that the performance of gas turbine and combined cycle systems fueled by the LCV fuels could be very different from the familiar behavior of natural gas fired systems. Care must be taken if on-shelf gas turbines are modified to burn LCV fuels.


Author(s):  
Washington Orlando Irrazabal Bohorquez ◽  
Joa˜o Roberto Barbosa ◽  
Luiz Augusto Horta Nogueira ◽  
Electo E. Silva Lora

The operational rules for the electricity markets in Latin America are changing at the same time that the electricity power plants are being subjected to stronger environmental restrictions, fierce competition and free market rules. This is forcing the conventional power plants owners to evaluate the operation of their power plants. Those thermal power plants were built between the 1960’s and the 1990’s. They are old and inefficient, therefore generating expensive electricity and polluting the environment. This study presents the repowering of thermal power plants based on the analysis of three basic concepts: the thermal configuration of the different technological solutions, the costs of the generated electricity and the environmental impact produced by the decrease of the pollutants generated during the electricity production. The case study for the present paper is an Ecuadorian 73 MWe power output steam power plant erected at the end of the 1970’s and has been operating continuously for over 30 years. Six repowering options are studied, focusing the increase of the installed capacity and thermal efficiency on the baseline case. Numerical simulations the seven thermal power plants are evaluated as follows: A. Modified Rankine cycle (73 MWe) with superheating and regeneration, one conventional boiler burning fuel oil and one old steam turbine. B. Fully-fired combined cycle (240 MWe) with two gas turbines burning natural gas, one recuperative boiler and one old steam turbine. C. Fully-fired combined cycle (235 MWe) with one gas turbine burning natural gas, one recuperative boiler and one old steam turbine. D. Fully-fired combined cycle (242 MWe) with one gas turbine burning natural gas, one recuperative boiler and one old steam turbine. The gas turbine has water injection in the combustion chamber. E. Fully-fired combined cycle (242 MWe) with one gas turbine burning natural gas, one recuperative boiler with supplementary burners and one old steam turbine. The gas turbine has steam injection in the combustion chamber. F. Hybrid combined cycle (235 MWe) with one gas turbine burning natural gas, one recuperative boiler with supplementary burners, one old steam boiler burning natural gas and one old steam turbine. G. Hybrid combined cycle (235 MWe) with one gas turbine burning diesel fuel, one recuperative boiler with supplementary burners, one old steam boiler burning fuel oil and one old steam turbine. All the repowering models show higher efficiency when compared with the Rankine cycle [2, 5]. The thermal cycle efficiency is improved from 28% to 50%. The generated electricity costs are reduced to about 50% when the old power plant is converted to a combined cycle one. When a Rankine cycle power plant burning fuel oil is modified to combined cycle burning natural gas, the CO2 specific emissions by kWh are reduced by about 40%. It is concluded that upgrading older thermal power plants is often a cost-effective method for increasing the power output, improving efficiency and reducing emissions [2, 7].


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Goldmeer ◽  
Paul Glaser ◽  
Bassam Mohammad

Abstract The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has seen significant transformation in power generation in the past 10 years. There has been an increase in the number of F-class combined cycle power plants being developed and brought into commercial operation. There has also been a shift to the use of natural gas as primary fuel. At the same time, there has been an interest in switching the back-up fuel for new power plants from refined distillates to domestic crude oils. Both Arabian Super Light (ASL) and Arabian Extra Light (AXL) have been proposed for use in new F-class gas turbine combined cycle power plants. This paper provides details on the combustion evaluations of ASL and AXL, as well as the first field usage of ASL in a gas turbine.


2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (02) ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Lee S. Langston

This article presents a study on new electric power gas turbines and the advent of shale natural gas, which now are upending electrical energy markets. Energy Information Administration (EIA) results show that total electrical production cost for a conventional coal plant would be 9.8 cents/kWh, while a conventional natural gas fueled gas turbine combined cycle plant would be a much lower at 6.6 cents/kWh. Furthermore, EIA estimates that 70% of new US power plants will be fueled by natural gas. Gas turbines are the prime movers for the modern combined cycle power plant. On the natural gas side of the recently upended electrical energy markets, new shale gas production and the continued development of worldwide liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities provide the other element of synergism. The US natural gas prices are now low enough to compete directly with coal. The study concludes that the natural gas fueled gas turbine will continue to be a growing part of the world’s electric power generation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 139 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shi Liu ◽  
Hong Yin ◽  
Yan Xiong ◽  
Xiaoqing Xiao

Heavy duty gas turbines are the core components in the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) system. Different from the conventional fuel for gas turbine such as natural gas and light diesel, the combustible component acquired from the IGCC system is hydrogen-rich syngas fuel. It is important to modify the original gas turbine combustor or redesign a new combustor for syngas application since the fuel properties are featured with the wide range hydrogen and carbon monoxide mixture. First, one heavy duty gas turbine combustor which adopts natural gas and light diesel was selected as the original type. The redesign work mainly focused on the combustor head and nozzle arrangements. This paper investigated two feasible combustor arrangements for the syngas utilization including single nozzle and multiple nozzles. Numerical simulations are conducted to compare the flow field, temperature field, composition distributions, and overall performance of the two schemes. The obtained results show that the flow structure of the multiple nozzles scheme is better and the temperature distribution inside the combustor is more uniform, and the total pressure recovery is higher than the single nozzle scheme. Through the full scale test rig verification, the combustor redesign with multiple nozzles scheme is acceptable under middle and high pressure combustion test conditions. Besides, the numerical computations generally match with the experimental results.


Author(s):  
Maurizio Spinelli ◽  
Stefano Campanari ◽  
Stefano Consonni ◽  
Matteo C. Romano ◽  
Thomas Kreutz ◽  
...  

The state-of-the-art conventional technology for postcombustion capture of CO2 from fossil-fueled power plants is based on chemical solvents, which requires substantial energy consumption for regeneration. A promising alternative, available in the near future, is the application of molten carbonate fuel cells (MCFC) for CO2 separation from postcombustion flue gases. Previous studies related to this technology showed both high efficiency and high carbon capture rates, especially when the fuel cell is thermally integrated in the flue gas path of a natural gas-fired combined cycle or an integrated gasification combined cycle plant. This work compares the application of MCFC-based CO2 separation process to pulverized coal fired steam cycles (PCC) and natural gas combined cycles (NGCC) as a “retrofit” to the original power plant. Mass and energy balances are calculated through detailed models for both power plants, with fuel cell behavior simulated using a 0D model calibrated against manufacturers' specifications and based on experimental measurements, specifically carried out to support this study. The resulting analysis includes a comparison of the energy efficiency and CO2 separation efficiency as well as an economic comparison of the cost of CO2 avoided (CCA) under several economic scenarios. The proposed configurations reveal promising performance, exhibiting very competitive efficiency and economic metrics in comparison with conventional CO2 capture technologies. Application as a MCFC retrofit yields a very limited (<3%) decrease in efficiency for both power plants (PCC and NGCC), a strong reduction (>80%) in CO2 emission and a competitive cost for CO2 avoided (25–40 €/ton).


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (12) ◽  
pp. 54-55
Author(s):  
Lee S. Langston

This article explains how combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants can help in reducing greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. In the last 25 years, the development and deployment of CCGT power plants represent a technology breakthrough in efficient energy conversion, and in the reduction of greenhouse gas production. Existing gas turbine CCGT technology can provide a reliable, on-demand electrical power at a reasonable cost along with a minimum of greenhouse gas production. Natural gas, composed mostly of methane, is a hydrocarbon fuel used by CCGT power plants. Methane has the highest heating value per unit mass of any of the hydrocarbon fuels. It is the most environmentally benign of fuels, with impurities such as sulfur removed before it enters the pipeline. If a significant portion of coal-fired Rankine cycle plants are replaced by the latest natural gas-fired CCGT power plants, anthropogenic carbon dioxide released into the earth’s atmosphere would be greatly reduced.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document