Gas Turbine Intake Air Hybrid Cooling Systems and a New Approach to Their Rational Designing

Gas turbine intake air cooling (TIAC) by exhaust gas heat recovery chillers is a general trend to improve turbine fuel efficiency at increased ambient temperatures. The high efficiency absorption lithium–bromide chillers of a simple cycle are the most widely used, but they are unable to cool inlet air lower than 15 °C. A two-stage hybrid absorption–ejector chillers were developed with absorption chiller as a high temperature stage and ejector chiller as a low temperature stage to subcool air from 15 °C to 10 °C and lower. A novel trend in TIAC by two-stage air cooling in hybrid chillers has been substantiated to provide about 50% higher annual fuel saving in temperate climate as compared with absorption cooling. A new approach to reduce practically twice design cooling capacity of absorption chiller due to its rational distribution with accumulating excessive refrigeration energy at decreased thermal loads to cover the picked demands and advanced design methodology based on it was proposed. The method behind this is issued from comparing a behavior of the characteristic curves of refrigeration energy required for TIAC with its available values according to various design cooling capacities to cover daily fluctuation of thermal loads at reduced by 15 to 20% design cooling capacity and practically maximum annual fuel reduction.