Selection of Gas Turbine Air Bottoming Cycle for Polish compressor stations

Abstract

Gas turbines are one of the basic technologies used to produce electricity and power working machinery. The popularity of the technology results from its advantages, the most important of which are: the fast start-up, high efficiency, low pollutant emissions, the short time needed for the installation to be constructed and a reasonable size. Gas turbines are becoming increasingly important in new power installations.An increase in the efficiency of energy systems can be achieved by development of combined cycles. Examples of high efficiency cycles are combined cycle power plants (CCPP) and gas turbine air bottoming cycles (GT-ABC), which are a combination of a gas turbine and air turbine cycle coupled by means of a heat exchanger referred to as the Air Heat Exchanger (AHX). The main feature of the GT (as well as GT-ABC) is a low water consumption. For this reason, it can be used in gas transport and storage systems. The construction of this type of systems may turn out to be energy-effective due to the advancement in flow machinery construction, especially in the field of improvement to blade profiles and sealing.The paper presents an application of gas-air systems with example configurations. Three technological structures are taken into consideration – a simple system of the ABC, an ABC with air one intercooler and advanced cycle with two intercooler. In order to improve the efficiency of air turbine installations, it is necessary to employ more complex system configurations.