APPLYING COMBINED PINCH AND EXERGY ANALYSIS TO CLOSED-CYCLE GAS-TURBINE SYSTEM-DESIGN

Pinch technology has developed into a powerful tool for thermodynamic analysis of chemical processes and associated utilities, resulting in significant energy savings. Conventional pinch analysis identifies the most economical energy consumption in terms of heat loads and provide s practical design guidelines to achieve this However in analyzing sys tems involving heat and power, for example, steam and gas turbines, et c., pure heat load analysis is insufficient. Exergy analysis, on the o ther hand, provides a tool for heat and power analysis, although at ti mes it does not provide clear practical design guidelines. An appropri ate combination of pinch and exergy analysis can procine practical met hodology for the analysis of heat and power systems. The methodology h as been successfully applied to refrigeration systems. This paper intr oduces the application of a combined pinch and energy approach to comm ercial power plants with a demonstration example of a closed-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) system. Efficiency improvement of about 0.82 percent ( 50.2 to 51.02 percent) can be obtained by application of the new appro ach. More importantly the approach can be rued as an analysis and scre ening tool for the various design improvements and is generally applic able to any commercial power generation facility.