Carbon Clean Combined Heat and Power Production from micro Gas Turbines: Thermodynamic Analysis of Different Scenarios

• Published in: Energy procedia Vol. 142; pp. 1622 - 1628
• Main Authors: Giorgetti, Simone, Parente, Alessandro, Bricteux, Laurent, Contino, Francesco, Paepe, Ward De
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Aspen Plus® simulations; Carbon Capture (CC); micro Gas Turbine (mGT); micro Humid Air Turbine (mHAT); micro Humid Air Turbine (mHAT); Carbon Capture (CC); micro Gas Turbine (mGT); Aspen Plus® simulations
• ISSN: 1876-6102; 1876-6102
• DOI: 10.1016/j.egypro.2017.12.540

With the current shift towards more decentralized power production, micro Gas Turbines (mGTs) appear as a promising technology for small-scale Combined Heat and Power (CHP) production. Nevertheless, if we want to move towards a carbon-clean power production, the CO2 in the exhaust gas must be captured. In this context, mGTs coupled with a Carbon Capture (CC) plant might be a good candidate, however there is still an energy penalty. Especially when there is no demand for heat and the mGT is only producing electrical power, this penalty becomes a major drawback. In this case, a possible solution is waste heat recovery in the system to increase the efficiency or to reduce the energy penalty, but few analyses are available to assess the optimal solution. In this paper, we aim at identifying the optimal strategy for carbon clean mGT operation in CHP applications for different operation scenarios: full CHP mode and operation with no thermal load. The effect of different technological measures such as humidification and internal heat recoveries has been investigated. The goal of these simulations was to evaluate the most efficient strategy for each thermal scenario of the mGT by testing different combinations of the previous measures. Results show that full CHP operation of the mGT with carbon capture has still the highest performance. Nonetheless, if the thermal demand is zero, conversion into mHAT and heat recovery for the stripping process result in a sensible reduction of the CC plant energy penalty, moving closer to the efficiency of traditional mGTs. Future work would include a more detailed analysis concerning mixed operation (part-load heat demand) of the mGT and an exergy analysis to identify where more waste heat can be recovered.