Professional Documents
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Applied Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apenergy
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e Scienze Matematiche, Universit Politecnica delle Marche, via Brecce Bianche, 60131 Ancona, Italy
Libera Universit di Bolzano, Facolt di Scienze e Tecnologie, piazza Universit, 5, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
h i g h l i g h t s
g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c t
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 26 June 2014
Received in revised form 1 February 2015
Accepted 20 February 2015
Keywords:
Micro turbines
Inlet air cooling
Distributed generation
Electrical efciency
Hot climates
Direct expansion
a b s t r a c t
Microturbines (MGTs) are power generation devices showing very interesting performance in terms of
low environmental impact, high-grade waste heat and very low maintenance cost. One of the main issues
that affect the output of MGTs is their strong sensibility to inlet air temperature. Both in literature and in
practical applications, several solutions have been applied to control the inlet air conditions and reduce
the sensibility of this kind of machines to ambient conditions. One of the most interesting technology is
the refrigerating vapour compression technique. This solution has already been used for medium/large
GTs, but there are very limited inlet air cooling applications on MGTs and few experimental data are
documented. This paper describes a test bench that has been designed to apply the direct vapour expansion technique to a 100 kWe MGT and reports the power and efciency augmentation of the machine
when operating in hot summer days.
The chiller was designed to treat the MGTs air ow rate under specic working conditions and cool the
inlet air temperature down to 15 C. Thanks to the reduction of the inlet air temperature, the MGT
showed a benet in terms of electric power gain up to 8% with respect to the nominal power output
in ISO conditions while the electric efciency increased by 1.5%. Results indicate that an almost linear
trend can be obtained both in the electric power increase and in the electric efciency increase as a
function of the inlet air temperature when the chiller operates under nominal working conditions.
Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0471 017816; fax: +39 0471 017009.
E-mail addresses: g.comodi@univpm.it (G. Comodi), massimiliano.renzi@unibz.it
(M. Renzi), f.caresana@univpm.it (F. Caresana), l.pelagalli@univpm.it (L. Pelagalli).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.02.076
0306-2619/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
41
When the IAC device operates at a higher temperature or a higher humidity than the design one, the gain
is limited; in some working conditions with high relative humidity, most of the benecial effect can even
be lost.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Among the energy production devices that can be adopted in
the distributed generation (DG) market, Microturbines (MGTs)
could play a signicant role [14] since their electric output varies
from 25 kW to 500 kW, which is a particularly interesting range for
cogeneration applications in the service sector, households and
small industry. Even if the electric efciency of MGTs is generally
smaller than that of internal combustion engines [5,6] they can
be protably applied in DG, thanks to their high power density,
low pollutants concentration, low operation and maintenance
(O&M) costs and multi fuel capability [7]. A signicant limitation
on the application of MGTs, especially in hot climates, is the strong
dependence of their performance, namely the electric output and
the electric efciency, on the ambient conditions, being the hot
ambient temperature the most affecting parameter. This characteristic, that is also recorded for larger GT, does not allow to exploit
the full potential of these machines which are normally rated in
ISO conditions (15 C, 101.3 kPa, 60% RH) [8].
Literature is rich of documents reporting the inuence of atmospheric conditions on industrial scale GTs performance. Several
works evaluated the performance loss of these machines in hot climates: depending on the size and the characteristics of the GT, the
electric power output can decrease by 0.50.9%/C [911]; even
greater losses are recorded for GTs of smaller capacities as reported
in a paper by Mohanty [12]. Amell and Cadavid [13] also investigated this issue and they attributed this behavior of smaller GTs
not only to the air density reduction with higher ambient temperature but also to a volumetric ow reduction.
As for MGTs, the effect of the inlet air temperature on their
performance has been investigated in a limited number of works
[1418]. This specic problem was already approached by the
authors of this paper: we designed a specic test bench to evaluate
the cogeneration performance of MGTs [19] and we adopted
the articial neural networks (ANNs) methodology [20] as well as
analytical models [21] to quantify the effect of ambient conditions
on the output of the machine. Air pressure and relative humidity do
not affect signicantly the performance of the machine while air
temperature strongly affects both the electric output and the electric efciency. In numerical terms, a reduction of about 1.22%/C for
the electric power and a reduction of about 0.51%/C for the electric
efciency was assessed for Turbec100 kWe MGT if compared to the
ISO ratings.
Since the performance of GTs is so sensible to ambient temperature variations, the so-called Inlet Air Cooling (IAC) techniques
have been studied and applied to reduce its impact. There are several works in literature that presented a series of solutions and the
benecial results that can be obtained by reducing the compressor
inlet air temperature.
A work by Al-Ibrahim et al. [22] describes the most used IAC
techniques that can be applied to enhance the performance of
GTs: (i) wetted media evaporative cooling; (ii) high-pressure
fogging; (iii) absorption chiller cooling using the GTs exhaust
gas; (iv) and refrigerative vapour compression cooling.
In some cases, it is also possible to have a combination of the
abovementioned technologies and obtain hybrid solutions in order
to use the most performing one depending on the environmental
conditions. A study by Al-Ansary et al. [23] showed that, combining
42
this technique does not entail the treatment of the inlet air. Lee
et al. [40] studied injection of hot water or steam in a 30 kWe
MGT for CHP applications. Steam is produced by recovering the
heat content of the exhaust and simulations of the machine performance are evaluated in the case of injection before the recuperator
or before the combustion chamber: in both cases the authors
reported signicant performance improvements.
Summarizing the performance gain achieved by the above mentioned IAC techniques, the electric power augmentation achieved
by using the evaporative cooling technology is in the range of
few percentage points (maximum 5%); as regards the high pressure
fogging the power output increase ranges between 5% and 10%
depending on the inlet ambient humidity, and thus on the capacity
of reducing the inlet air temperature. As regards absorption cooling
and vapour compression cooling the electric power gain can be
over 20% when the ambient conditions are particularly favorable
as it is possible to reduce sensibly the compressor inlet air temperature even below the wet bulb temperature (even down to a
few degrees over 0 C). Anyhow, also in this case ambient humidity
plays a signicant role as in humid climates most of the thermal
power from the chiller is used to abate the latent heat with only
a minor benet in terms of GT electric output.
While IAC techniques have been widely applied in large sized
GT, there is a lack of experience in the application of these techniques to MGTs. In a previous paper [41] the authors of this work
have already described the application of the fogging technique to
a Turbec T100 HP MGT, demonstrating very good performance
improvements (over 10%), even though the power output enhancement is strongly dependent on the ambient conditions, namely air
humidity.
In this work, the direct expansion mechanical vapour compression technology is adopted to treat the process air of the same type
of MGT in order to reduce the sensitivity of the machines performance to the ambient conditions. This technology was chosen
since it shows better energy recovery performance with respect
to indirect expansion systems and because it allows to adjust the
temperature at the inlet of the MGT with a simple retrotted control, independently of ambient conditions. While the evaporation
techniques are restricted by the wet bulb temperature, vapour
compression machines can also reach lower temperatures with
the only limitation of the maximum chiller capacity.
The aims of the work are to: (i) describe the test bench
developed to apply the direct expansion vapour compression IAC
technology to a 100 kWe MGT; (ii) report the experimental results
on the performance of the machine when operating in hot ambient
temperature with the IAC; (iii) describe the advantages of this
technology in terms of electric power and electric efciency gain
and thus fulll the lack of relevant scientic literature in the application of the direct expansion vapour compression technology to
MGTs.
The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 the MGT under
analysis is presented; Section 3 reports the description of the
experimental setup and the design of the IAC system; Section 4
illustrates the results of the test campaign; nally Section 5 reports
the concluding remarks.
_ air hamb
Pc m
air
hcool
air
43
Characteristics
Compressor
Air condenser
Evaporator
Liquid receiver
Dry lter
Thermal expansion valve
Bitzer 4DC-7.2Y
Alfa Laval ACS-502-C
KFL P35E
FRIGOMEC 11
Carly DCY 165
Danfoss EVR10-32F-1214
(a)
(b)
Fig. 1. (a) Modied intake duct scheme and (b) direct expansion evaporator.
3.3. Modied intake duct for the evaporation heat exchanger and the
measurement instruments
Table 2
Measuring instruments used in the test bench.
Instrument
Typology
Accuracy
Air temperature
and humidity
Pressure drop
Fuel ow rate
SIEMENS QFM3171
Temperature: 0.8 K
Humidity: 2% R.H.
0.40%
0.35%
The experimental data were collected during selected hot summer days when the operation of the MGT is penalized by the high
ambient temperature. The level of relative humidity in the location
where the test bench has been realized during the test days ranged
between 45% and 70% while ambient temperature ranged between
23 C and 34 C. This means that some of the tests were performed
with ambient conditions that were more severe (higher temperature and higher humidity) with respect to the design conditions
44
35
90
30
80
25
70
60
20
50
15
40
30
10
20
100
10
0
14:15
Air temperature
before the HE
Air tempearture
after the HE
Air humidity
before the HE
Air humidity after
the HE
Direct expansion
HE thermal power
0
14:29
14:44
14:58
15:12
Time
Fig. 2. Trend of the temperature and the relative humidity upstream and downstream the evaporator heat exchanger (HE) for a selected test day (initial relative humidity
53%).
90
30
80
25
70
60
20
50
15
40
30
10
20
5
10
0
15:57
35
100
Air temperature
before the HE
Air tempearture
after the HE
Air humidity
before the HE
Air humidity after
the HE
Direct expansion
HE thermal power
0
16:00
16:03
16:05
16:08
Time
Fig. 3. Trend of the temperature and the relative humidity upstream and downstream the evaporator (initial relative humidity 45%).
of the chiller. In the following data are reported both for on-design
and off-design working conditions.
During the tests, the pressure drop across the evaporator varied
from 250 and 300 Pa, with a negligible effect on the machine performance [20].
Fig. 2 reports the trend of data measured by the air temperature
and air humidity probes in a selected test day. Data are reported
starting from few minutes before activating the chiller and
throughout all the steady operation of both the chiller and the
MGT. The graph clearly shows that when the IAC system operates,
temperature drops down to 15 C starting from 28 C: the blue1
line refers to the air temperature before the evaporator heat exchanger (HE) and the red line is the temperature after it. Downstream the
heat exchanger, relative humidity rises to 8588% starting from a
value of about 5254% (black and purple line respectively). The air
temperature reduction is effective when an approximate steadystate working condition is reached. The green line indicates the thermal power that is extracted by the evaporator in the inlet air duct,
1
For interpretation of color in Figs. 27, the reader is referred to the web version of
this article.
both in terms of sensible and latent heat; the peak extracted thermal
power is about 20 kW.
A similar trend is also indicated in Fig. 3 that reports the same
acquired quantities in another selected test day. In this case ambient humidity was lower, about 45%, and the ambient temperature
was higher (about 33 C). The evaporator extracts a maximum of
about 27 kW of thermal power from the inlet air which reaches a
temperature of 16.5 C which is slightly higher than the target
one. As the ambient humidity has a signicant weight on the value
of the specic enthalpy, it is possible to see that in a dry climate the
thermal power required to cool down the stream of air is lower
than the previous case where the humidity was higher.
In Fig. 4, besides the trend of the temperature upstream and
downstream the evaporator (red and blue lines respectively), the
value of the power output of the MGT is depicted for the same test
of Fig. 2. The graph reports the actual power produced by the MGT
during the tests with the IAC system operating (dark blue line) and
the trend of the electric power of the machine without the application IAC technique (purple line). This latter value was evaluated
using the articial neural network (ANN) methodology that has
already been successfully applied by the authors of the present
paper in the study of this MGT [20]. By means of this technique,
45
100
50
90
45
80
40
70
35
60
30
50
25
40
20
30
15
20
10
10
14:18
14:32
14:47
Electric power
without IAC
Net electric
power with IAC
Chiller electric
consumption
Air tempearture
after the HE
Air tempearture
before the HE
MGT power
with IAC
15:01
Time
Fig. 4. Inlet air temperature, MGT output and chiller power consumption with and without the IAC (initial humidity 53%).
100
50
90
45
40
70
35
60
50
30
40
25
30
20
80
Electric power
without IAC
Net electric
power with IAC
Chiller electric
consumption
Air tempearture
after the HE
20
15
10
0
15:57
Air tempearture
before the HE
10
15:59
16:01
16:04
Time
16:06
16:08
16:10
Fig. 5. Inlet air temperature, MGT output and chiller power consumption with and without the IAC (initial humidity 45%).
chiller results to be higher and the net electric power augmentation is lower. Also in this case, the net electric power output
increases by 6 kWe with respect to the simple MGT without IAC
since both the chiller has a higher consumption and the MGT has
a higher power recovery.
All the presented data referring to the test days were collected
together in the graph in Fig. 6: the gains in terms of electric efciency and electric power output using the IAC system are presented. During the tests ambient temperature varied from a
minimum value of 22.5 C to a maximum value of 33.5 C. The blue
dots show the MGTs power output when the evaporation cooling
chiller was active; the red dots report the electric output of the
machine in absence of the IAC system. The rst outcome of the
results is that, while in absence of a cooling device the machines
electric output is strongly sensitive to ambient temperature, the
machine performance is almost constant when the evaporation
cooling is active; the only limitation is given by the capacity of
the evaporator to bring the inlet air to the nominal set-point value
of 15 C. Indeed, when ambient temperature and ambient humidity are higher than the design values (30 C and 60% respectively),
the chiller is no longer capable to cool down the air temperature
till the design set-point and the MGTs output shows a slight
46
34%
90
32%
80
30%
70
60
28%
50
26%
40
30
Efficiency
110
24%
20
22%
10
20%
0
21
24
27
30
33
36
10
14
12
8
6
4
2
0
-2
-4
-6
-8
-10
-12
10
-2
-14
21
24
27
30
33
36
blue data points refer to IAC results carried out with the chiller
operating under the design conditions described in Section 3.2;
instead, the black and the dark blue dots refer to IAC results carried
out with the chiller operating under off-design conditions.
The net power increase (MGT power production minus the
chiller power consumption, grey dots) ranges between 0 and
8.5 kW depending on the ambient conditions, namely temperature
and humidity, while the electric efciency gain ranges between
0.3% and 1.6% (light blue dots). In particular, the lower the
ambient humidity, the higher the sensible thermal power that
can be extracted by the evaporator; therefore, for a given required
temperature reduction till the set point temperature of 15 C, the
chiller has a lower electric consumption and the IAC technique is
more performing. Conversely, when the ambient enthalpy is higher
than the design point (either given by higher temperature or ambient humidity), the temperature at the MGT inlet is higher than the
set point and the power increase is smaller, as well as the IAC technique effectiveness. This effect is reported in Fig. 7 with the black
dots data for the electric power gain and the dark blue dots data for
the electric efciency gain. These data points are highly dispersed
since the nal electric performance of the system depends on the
specic ambient parameters. Therefore, in those conditions the
electric output enhancement is signicantly reduced and the electric efciency gain can even be negative, down to 0.8%. Another
interesting remark can be deduced by the general trend of the
electric efciency gain: as soon as the chiller works under design
conditions and it is capable of cooling the air to the set point value,
it is possible to gure an increasing trend of the electric efciency
gain. On the contrary, when the system works in off-design conditions, the chiller continuously operates at its nominal maximum
electric consumption but it is not able to cool down the air till
15 C anymore. Therefore, the higher the ambient temperature or
the ambient humidity, the higher the MGTs inlet temperature;
as a consequence, the net electric efciency gain tends to decrease
with high ambient temperature.
On the basis of the reported data it is possible to sum up some
comments on the application of vapour compression cooling systems coupled with a 100 kWe MGT: (i) the advantage in terms of
both electric power gain and electric efciency gain is very small
if the temperature difference achieved with the IAC device is limited (for example when the air temperature is lower than 25 C
and the set-point temperature is 15 C); (ii) the level of the ambient air humidity strongly inuences the effectiveness of the IAC
system as a signicant part of the thermal power exchanged in
the evaporator is used to reduce the latent heat and it does not
result in an increase of the MGTs output; (iii) when the chiller
operates in off-design conditions, i.e. with higher temperature
and humidity with respect to the design ones, the temperature
downstream the evaporator is higher than the nominal one, the
electric output gain tends to atten and the electric efciency gain
decreases.
5. Conclusions
The performance of MGTs is particularly sensitive to the ambient conditions and hot inlet air temperature determines a signicant loss in terms of electric power output, even higher than
large sized GTs as documented in several works. The vapour compression IAC technology can be used to reduce the MGTs compressor inlet temperature and achieve material advantages in terms of
machine performance in hot and dry climates. This solution,
already proposed in large production plants, has never been
applied to MGTs. The paper describes the design and the operation
of a direct expansion IAC system that was applied to a 100 kWe
microturbine. The disposition and the dimensioning of the
47
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