Feasibility Study of an Intercooled-Cycle Marine Gas Turbine

Abstract

From the perspective of an overall entity we analyzed the performance obtainable from the adoption of an intercooled-cycle gas turbine under different typical cycle parameters of a gas turbine. On this basis, a study was conducted of the conversion of a high-power simple-cycle marine gas turbine (MGT-33) into a type of intercooled-cycle marine gas turbine. The precondition of the conversion is to keep the flow path and the majority of the structure of the original engine gas generator unchanged in order to inherit the reliability of the prototype machine. The results of the study indicate that after the adoption of an intercooled cycle under the precondition of performing minimum structure modifications and maintaining the compactness of the engine as a whole, there is still a significant enhancement of the gas turbine overall performance with its power output and efficiency being increased by about 34% and 4.1%, respectively, demonstrating the merits of the engineering conversion under discussion.