Predicting the Impact of Compressor Flexibility Improvements on Heavy-Duty Gas Turbines for Minimum and Base Load Conditions

Martina Ricci, Marcello Benvenuto, Stefano Gino Mosele, Roberto Pacciani () and Michele Marconcini
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Martina Ricci: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Via di S. Marta, 3, 50139 Florence, Italy
Marcello Benvenuto: Ansaldo Energia, Via Nicola Lorenzi, 8, 16152 Genoa, Italy
Stefano Gino Mosele: Ansaldo Energia, Via Nicola Lorenzi, 8, 16152 Genoa, Italy
Roberto Pacciani: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Via di S. Marta, 3, 50139 Florence, Italy
Michele Marconcini: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Via di S. Marta, 3, 50139 Florence, Italy

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 20, 1-14

Abstract: The increasing importance of renewable energy capacity in the power generation scenario, together with the fluctuating consumer energy demand, forces conventional fossil fuel power generation systems to promptly respond to relevant and rapid load variations and to operate under off-design conditions during a major fraction of their lives. In order to improve existing power plants’ flexibility in facing energy surplus or deficit, retrofittable solutions for gas turbine compressors are proposed. In this paper, two different operation strategies, variable inlet guide vanes (IGVs) and blow-off extraction (BO), are considered for enabling partial load and minimum environmental load operation, and thus to identify implementation opportunities in existing thermal power plants. A typical 15-stage F-class gas turbine compressor is chosen as a test case and some energy demand scenarios are selected to validate the adopted solutions. The results of an extensive 3D, steady, CFD analysis are compared with the measurements coming from an experimental campaign carried out in the framework of the European Turbo-Reflex project. It will be shown how the combined strategies can reduce gas turbine mass flow rate and power plant output, without significantly penalizing efficiency, and how such off-design performance figures can be reliably predicted by employing state-of-the-art CFD models.

Keywords: axial compressor; minimum environmental load; computational fluid dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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