Optimal gas turbine integration to the process industries

Deregulated electricity markets provide good opportunities for the process industries to seek benefits by importing or exporting electricity. Gas turbine is a very good option for increasing power generation capacity due to its high power-to-heat ratio and relatively low investment cost. In this paper, a new systematic methodology for gas turbine integration is presented. The methodology employs mathematical programming in a systematic manner. The first stage is a screening stage, where promising gas turbine integration options and the optimal size range for a gas turbine are identified. These options with the model of the existing plant form a superstructure, which is optimized to get an initial design. In the second stage, constraint analysis identifies the dominant constraining units in the existing system. Relaxing these constraints and introducing new options are then considered in updating the superstructure, subject to further optimization. With this strategy, we effectively solve a much smaller optimization problem while guaranteeing good solution quality from this iterative approach.