Comparison of evaporative inlet air cooling systems to enhance the gas turbine generated power

The gas turbine performance is highly sensitive to the compressor inlet temperature. The output of gas turbine falls to a value that is less than the rated output under high temperature conditions. In fact increase in inlet air temperature by 1°C will decrease the output power by 0.7% approximately. The solution of this problem is very important because the peak demand season also happens in the summer. One of the convenient methods of inlet air cooling is evaporating cooling which is appropriate for warm and dry weather. As most of the gas turbines in Iran are installed in such ambient conditions regions, therefore this method can be used to enhance the performance of the gas turbines. In this paper, an overview of technical and economic comparison of media system and fog system is given. The performance test results show that the mean output power of Frame‐9 gas turbines is increased by 11 MW (14.5%) by the application of media cooling system in Fars power plant and 8.1 MW (8.9%) and 9.5 MW (11%) by the application of fog cooling system in Ghom and Shahid Rajaie power plants, respectively. The total enhanced power generation in the summer of 2004 was 2970, 1701 and 1340 MWh for the Fars, Ghom and Shahid Rajaie power plants, respectively. The economical studies show that the payback periods are estimated to be around 2 and 3 years for fog and media systems, respectively. This study has shown that both methods are suitable for the dry and hot areas for gas turbine power augmentation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.