Thermo-Economic Analysis of a hybrid solar micro gas turbine power plant

This work proposes a hybrid system based on a micro-gas turbine plant integrated with a solar field either to provide a part of the heat addition or to totally replace the combustor in the case that the only solar heat input is enough to ensure that the working fluid reaches the turbine inlet temperature. The system can operate in a pure combustion mode when solar irradiance is weak or completely absent during some hours in the day or seasons. The analysis is based on the simulation of the overall plant by the Thermoflex software, a modular program that allows assembling model with several components. In particular, many calculations have been performed to simulate the solar-assisted cogenerating plant in different operating conditions in order to identify the optimum sizing of the solar system which reduces the annual costs or the fuel consumption and, consequently, the CO2 emissions. Numerical results are compared with the data available from standard micro gas turbine plant. Finally, an economical evaluation by calculation the SPB (simple pay back) is obtained for all test cases to evaluate the benefit from Italian State incentives. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 72nd Conference of the Italian Thermal Machines Engineering Association