PREDICTION OF PERFORMANCE OF GAS TURBINE OPERATING ON AIR USING 3D CFD

In this paper the work is to demonstrate the performance of single stage gas turbine which is able to operate with hot air as a working fluid at specific boundary conditions. These boundary conditions were chosen to be compatible with a Brayton cycle. The evaluation is dependent on the turbine efficiency and output power. Firstly, preliminary design work was completed in order to figure out the turbines shapes and find initial information about the impact of various factors on their efficiency values and output powers. Factors considered were: inlet pressure, inlet temperature, rotational speed and the mass flow rate. The performance was predicted at two different operating pressures (2bar and 3 bar) at constant temperature (600K) by varying rotational speeds. Subsequently, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling was completed for gas turbine to study the effect of other factors and have accurate results. The simulation results showed that an improvement in total turbine efficiency from 80-90% for a fixed cycle boundary conditions