Thermal Energy Storage for Gas Turbine Power Augmentation

This work is concerned with the investigation of thermal energy storage (TES) in relation to gas turbine inlet air cooling. The utilization of such techniques in simple gas turbine or combined cycle plants leads to improvement of flexibility and overall performance. Its scope is to review the various methods used to provide gas turbine power augmentation through inlet cooling and focus on the rising opportunities when these are combined with thermal energy storage. The results show that there is great potential in such systems due to their capability to provide intake conditioning of the gas turbine, decoupled from the ambient conditions. Moreover, latent heat TES have the strongest potential (compared to sensible heat TES) towards integrated inlet conditioning systems, making them a comparable solution to the more conventional cooling methods and uniquely suitable for energy production applications where stabilization of GT air inlet temperature is a requisite. Considering the system’s thermophysical, environmental and economic characteristics, employing TES leads to more than 10% power augmentation.