Preliminary Design Procedure for Gas Turbine Topping Reverse-Flow Wave Rotors

This paper shows a preliminary design procedure for four-port reverse-flow wave rotors for implementation in gas turbine applications. First, a thermodynamic cycle analysis evaluates the performance improvement of a 30 kW microturbine by implementing various wave-rotor topping cycles. Five different advantageous implementation cases for a four-port wave rotor into the given baseline engine are considered. Advantages and disadvantages are outlined. The results obtained show that almost all the cases studied benefit from the wave-rotor-topping, but the highest gain is obtained for the case in which the topped engine operates with the same turbine inlet temperature and compressor pressure ratio as the baseline engine. Then, a one-dimensional analytical gas dynamic model of the high-pressure phase (charging zone) is employed to calculate flow characteristics inside the channels. Charts and explanations are presented for optimum design. Useful design parameters such as port widths and rotor size are determined by formulating traveling times of the waves inside the channels.

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