Thermo-economic analysis of recuperated Maisotsenko bottoming cycle using triplex air saturator: Comparative analyses

Abstract A recently recommended combined cycle power plant is to employ another gas turbine cycle for waste heat recovery as an air bottoming cycle (ABC). There are some studies conducted to improve ABC’s thermodynamic performance utilizing commonly power augmentation methods such as steam/water injection. In particular, it is proposed to employ Maisotsenko gas turbine cycle as a bottoming cycle, i.e. Maisotsenko bottoming cycle (MBC). Due to the promising performance of the MBC configuration, it is decided to investigate a recuperated MBC (RMBC) configuration by recommending the triplex air saturator. In this way, the air saturator consists of three sections. The first section is an indirect evaporative cooler while the other two sections are responsible for heat recovery from the topping and bottoming cycle turbines exhaust. In this paper, thermodynamic and thermo-economic analyses are carried out to study the main merits and demerits of RMBC against MBC configuration. Thermodynamic optimization results indicate that the maximum achievable efficiency for MBC and RMBC incorporation in a simple gas turbine power plant are 39.40% and 44.73%, respectively. Finally, thermo-economic optimization shows that the optimum levelized cost of electricity for MBC and RMBC power plants are 62.922 US$/MWh and 58.154 US$/MWh, respectively.