Investigation of Cooling Effectiveness of Gas Turbine Inlet Fogging Location Relative to the Silencer

The output and efficiency of gas turbines are reduced significantly during the summer, especially in areas where the daytime temperature reaches as high as 50°C. Gas turbine inlet fogging and overspray has been considered a simple and cost-effective method to increase the power output. One of the most important issues related to inlet fogging is to determine the most effective location of the fogging device by determining (a) how many water droplets actually evaporate effectively to cool down the inlet air instead of colliding on the wall or coalescing and draining out (i.e., fogging efficiency), and (b) quantifying the amount of nonevaporated droplets that may reach the compressor bellmouth to ascertain the erosion risk for compressor airfoils if wet compression is to be avoided. When the silencer is installed, there is an additional consideration for placing the fogging device upstream or downstream of the silencer baffles. Placing arbitrarily the device upstream of the silencer can cause the silencer to intercept water droplets on the silencer baffles and lose cooling effectiveness. This paper employs computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate the water droplet transport and cooling effectiveness with different spray locations such as before and after the silencer baffles. Analysis on the droplet history (trajectory and size) is employed to interpret the mechanism of droplet dynamics under influence of acceleration, diffusion, and body forces when the flow passes through the baffles and duct bent. The results show that, for the configuration of the investigated duct, installing the fogging system upstream of the silencer is about 3 percentage points better in evaporation effectiveness than placing it downstream of the silencer, irrespective of whether the silencer consists of a single row of baffles or two rows of staggered baffles. The evaporation effectiveness of the staggered silencer is about 0.8 percentage points higher than the single silencer. The pressure drop of the staggered silencer is 6.5% higher than the single silencer.