Design of A Heat Exchanger for Gas Turbine Inlet Air Cooling System

The ambient temperature has the greatest effect on gas turbine performance, due to
change of the turbine air inlet-temperature and pressure ratio. Thus, thermodynamic analyses
exposed that thermal efficiency and specific output decrease with an increase of humidity and
ambient temperature. The aim of this project is to design a heat exchanger for gas turbine inlet
air cooling system in order to increase the efficiency of the gas turbine. The project attempts to
maintain a constant temperature of the inlet of gas turbine engine irrespective ofthe increasing in
ambient temperature. This has been accomplished by developing a mathematical model based on
the step by step techniques so that variation of all design parameters can be calculated. The
author has set the tube diameter and number of rows as the variables while the other geometry
parameters remain constant throughout this project. At the end, a set of variables data is
compared to predict the heat exchanger performance. The increasing of the tube diameter and
number of rows has increased the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop in the system.
Among the samples, the optimum design of the heat exchanger consisted of 26 rows of
horizontal tube and 0.06185 m tube inner diameter.