Steam turbines in solar thermal power plants experience a much greater number of starts than those operating in baseload plants. In order to preserve the lifetime of the turbine while still allowing fast starts, it is of great interest to find ways to maintain the turbine temperature during idle periods. A dynamic model of a solar steam turbine has been elaborated, simulating both the heat conduction within the body and the heat exchange with the gland steam, main steam and the environment, allowing prediction of the temperatures within the turbine during off-design operation and standby. The model has been validated against 96 h of measured data from the Andasol 1 power plant, giving an average error of 1.2% for key temperature measurements. The validated model was then used to evaluate a number of modifications that can be made to maintain the turbine temperature during idle periods. Heat blankets were shown to be the most effective measure for keeping the turbine casing warm, whereas increasing the gland steam temperature was most effective in maintaining the temperature of the rotor. By applying a combination of these measures the dispatchability of the turbine can be improved significantly: electrical output can be increased by up to 9.5% after a long cooldown and up to 9.8% after a short cooldown.
Direct steam generation (DSG) is one alternative to the current oil-based parabolic trough solar thermal power plants. Within the German research project ITES, the dynamic behavior of a DSG collector field and the interactions with the conventional power block are assessed in detail. A transient solar field model developed by DLR is used to simulate the steam temperature behavior. Artificial irradiance disturbances as well as real irradiance data are used as input to the system. The resulting main steam temperature gradients are then analyzed by Siemens considering the standards for steam turbines.This paper presents the transient simulation results of the steam temperature as well as the corresponding results of the steam turbine analysis. It is found that the occurring temperature gradients are challenging for a safe turbine operation, if a conservative control system is used. Therefore, the use of an additional thermal inertia to stabilize the steam temperature is suggested. Its impact is also analyzed and discussed in this paper.
This paper presents a new International Standard Configuration to be added to an already existing set of 10 configurations for unsteady flow through vibrating axial-flow turbomachine cascades. This 11th configuration represents a turbine blade geometry with transonic design flow conditions with a normal shock positioned at 75% real chord on the suction side. Out of a set of test cases covering all relevant flow regimes two cases were selected for publication: A subsonic, attached flow case and an off-design transonic case showing a separation bubble at 30% real chord on the suction side are published. The performed tests are shown to be repeatable and suitable for code validations of numerical models predicting flutter in viscous flows. The validity of the measured data of the two public cases was examined and comparisons with other tests were conducted. Sometimes a large difference in aerodynamic damping was observed on cases with similar flow conditions. This was investigated at three transonic cases with almost identical inlet flow conditions and only small variations in outlet Mach Number. It was found that the differences in the global damping are due to very local changes on the blade surface in the shock region, which obtain a large influence by the integration because of the discrete measuring points. Hence it is recommended not to look at the global damping for code validations but more precisely to the local values. These show a common tendency, which is reproducible with different numerical methods. This was demonstrated with a potential model, a linear Euler model, a nonlinear Euler model and a Navier-Stokes solver, all applied to predict flutter of each test case with a 2D/Q3D approach. The limitations of inviscid codes to predict flutter in viscous flow regimes is demonstrated, but also their cost advantage in attached flow calculations. The need of viscous code development and validation is pointed out. This should justify and encourage the publication of thoroughly measured test cases with viscous effects.
Solar steam turbines are subject to high thermal stresses as a result of temperature gra dients during transient operation, which occurs more frequently due to the variability of the solar resource. In order to increase the flexibility of the turbines while preserving lift ing requirements, several operational modifications for maintaining turbine temperatures during offline periods are proposed and investigated. The modifications were imple mented in a dynamic thermal turbine model and the potential improvements were quanti fied. The modifications studied included: increasing the gland steam pressure injected to the end-seals, increasing the back pressure and increasing the barring speed. These last two take advantage of the ventilation and friction work. The effects of the modifications were studied both individually as well as in different combinations. The temperatures obtained when applying the combined modifications were compared to regular turbine cool-down (CD) temperatures and showed significant improvements on the startup times of the turbine.
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