Development of an Ultra-High Efficiency Gas Turbine Engine (UHEGT) with Stator Internal Combustion: Design, Off-Design, and Nonlinear Dynamic Operation
Abstract
An Ultra-High Efficiency Gas Turbine (UHEGT) technology is developed in this
study. In UHEGT, the combustion process is no longer contained in isolation between the
compressor and turbine, rather distributed in multiple stages and integrated within the
High-Pressure (HP)-turbine stator rows. Fundamental issues of aero-thermodynamic
design, combustion, and heat transfer are addressed in this study. The aero-thermodynamic
study shows that the UHEGT-concept improves the thermal efficiency of gas turbines by
5-7% above the current most advanced gas turbine engines, such as Alstom GT24. The
designed thermodynamic cycle has a 45% thermal efficiency and includes a six-stage
turbine with three stages of stator internal combustion. Meanline approach is used to
preliminary design the entire flow path in the turbine. Multiple configurations are designed
and simulated via Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to achieve the optimum
combustion system for UHEGT. Flow patterns, temperature distributions, secondary
losses, etc. are among the parameters studied in the results. The final configuration for the
combustion system includes two rows of injectors placed before the stator rows in the first
three turbine stages. The current injector configuration provides a highly uniform
temperature distribution at the rotor inlet, low pressure loss, and low emissions compared
to the other cases. Different approaches are numerically studied to lower the stator blade
surface temperature distribution in UHEGT from which indexing (clocking) is shown to
be very effective.
In the final part of this study, a dynamic simulation is performed on the entire engine
using the nonlinear generic code GETRAN developed by Schobeiri. The simulations are in
2D (space-time) and include the complete gas turbine engine. The system performance is
studied under variable design and off-design conditions. The results show that most of the
system parameters fluctuate with similar patterns to the fuel schedule. However, the
amplitudes of the fluctuations are different and there is a time lag in the response profiles
relative to the fuel schedules. It is shown that thermal efficiency variations are smaller
compared to the other parameters which means the system performs in efficiencies close to
the design point throughout the entire cycle.
Citation
Ghoreyshi, Seyedmostafa (2018). Development of an Ultra-High Efficiency Gas Turbine Engine (UHEGT) with Stator Internal Combustion: Design, Off-Design, and Nonlinear Dynamic Operation. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A & M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /174302.