Off-Design Behavior Analysis and Operating Curve Design of Marine Intercooled Gas Turbine

The intercooled gas turbine obtained by adopting an indirect heat exchanger into an existing gas turbine is one of the candidates for developing high-power marine power units. To simplify such a strong coupled nonlinear system reasonably, the feasibility and availability of qualifying equivalent effectiveness as the only parameter to evaluate the intercooler behavior are investigated. Regarding equivalent effectiveness as an additional degree of freedom, the steady state model of a marine intercooled gas turbine is developed and its off-design performance is analyzed. With comprehensive considerations given to various phase missions of ships, operational flexibility, mechanical constraints, and thermal constraints, the operating curve of the intercooled gas turbine is optimized based on graphical method in three-dimensional performance space. The resulting operating curve revealed that the control strategy at the steady state conditions for the intercooled gas turbine should be variable cycle control. The necessity of integration optimization design for gas turbine and intercooler is indicated and the modeling and analysis method developed in this paper should be beneficial to it.