Flowmaster Siemens
Flowmaster Siemens
Flowmaster Siemens
Power Generation
Siemens
Siemens and Flowmaster working together - for enhanced secondary air systems.
Siemens heavy duty gas turbines have been well known for their high power output combined with high efficiency and reliability for more than 30 years. Offering state of the art technology at all times, the requirements of the cooling and sealing air systems have increased with technological development over the years. In particular, the increase of turbine inlet temperature and reduced nitrous oxides emissions requirements demand a highly efficient cooling and sealing air system. The new Vx4.3A family with an ISO turbine inlet temperature of 1190 C in the power range of 70 to 240 MW uses an effective film cooling technique for the first and second turbine stages to ensure the minimum cooling air requirement. Additionally, film cooling allows a simpler cooling system. For example, no intercooler and no cooling air booster for the first turbine vane are needed in the new family. This case study describes the internal system which supplies cooling and sealing air. It gives a general overview and describes some of the problems and their solutions. Furthermore, a state of the art calculation system, based on Flowmaster, is described. This makes extensive use of the External Component Model facility within Flowmaster to model the
Introduction
Since the introduction of the gas turbine, manufacturers have paid scant attention to the amount of cooling and leakage air. The impact on performance measures such as thermal efficiency and power output was neglected and the effect on nitrous oxides emissions was not even discussed. This changed with the introduction of combined cycle gas turbine plant for base load power generation. The high thermal efficiency for the combined cycle plant demands high turbine inlet temperatures. These lead to a dramatic increase in cooling and sealing air requirement which adversely affects the three main performance measures. Cooling air is required to keep the material temperature of components in the hot flows below the maximum allowable temperature. If this is exceeded, then the physical properties, such as tensile strength and creep limits are severely reduced. Sealing air is used to prevent the clearances between rotor and stator from hot gas ingestion. The designers goal is to keep the amount of cooling and sealing air to a minimum. In this way, the work done by the machine on each amount of air saved can be used to generate power and increase the thermal efficiency. Therefore the selection of cooling and sealing air extraction and the sizing is of critical importance. The splined disk construction used by Siemens permits easy selection of the air extraction points conferring great advantages for blade and vane cooling.
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CS173
However, as the flows are different from normal Flowmaster applications, the solution must be extended. This is done by using the External Component Model (ECM) facility. The ECM facility allows you to connect and analyse your own FORTRAN or C models in Flowmaster networks. They enable an end-user to build their own application specific component models and use them in Flowmaster. Once added to Flowmaster networks, ECMs may use standard data entry forms and results processing. They may also be reused in any network. For axi-symmetric flows the flow vector is treated as a two-dimensional vector with components in the circumferential and meridional directions. In the gas turbine there are axi-symmetric passages of varying radii where the circumferential velocity can develop freely and differ significantly from the rotational speed of the walls. Therefore it is essential for the description of the flow through the secondary air system that the two velocity components are treated separately. It is believed that Flowmaster is the only commercially available 1-D code that permits such a treatment of the flow vector.
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CS173
Conclusions
As shown by the latest test bed results, Flowmaster has been successfully applied for the prediction of flow rates, pressures and temperatures in Siemens gas turbine secondary air systems. Calculation methods and correlations were developed for the secondary air flow through the rotating blades. Flowmaster has been extended by writing ECMs to make it applicable for this. This work has resulted in a design model that enables complete cooling and sealing air flows to be studied.
www.siemens.com
www.flowmaster.com
CS173