The energy analysis of GE-F5 gas turbines inlet air–cooling systems by the off-design method

Abstract

Increasing the inlet air temperature causes a reduction in the air mass flow rate, and the efficiency and output power of a gas power plant will reduced. To compensate this power and efficiency decrease, different cooling systems can be applied to the inlet air flow. This paper introduces and analyzes different gas turbine cooling systems and studies their effect on the efficiency of Zanbagh power plant’s G11 gas unit by extracting the governing equations regarding the characteristic curve and coding in the MATLAB software. In average, the simulation results show that reduction of 1 °C of inlet air temperature between 14 °C and 50 °C causes an efficiency and power output increase by 0.085% and 0.16 MW, respectively. The maximum cycle efficiency increase applied to cool the inlet air is around 2.7%, which can be achieved using the wet compression method. In addition, this method can reduce fuel consumption by 5% in comparison to a normal cycle.