Thermal and economic analysis of Besat steam power plant repowering

There is a rapid growth of electricity consumption in the world. This problem needs enough resources for capital investment for construction of new power plants and/or making all efforts to increase the thermal efficiency of existing power generation cycles. Therefore this situation has lead power generation industries to repower and modify the existing steam power plants which are constructed in the recent three or four decades. In this paper an important method for repowering of old steam power plants which uses a gas turbine is analyzed. Hot Wind Box (HWB) repowering method was technically and economically evaluated to repower the Besat steam power plant. This power plant was constructed and exploited in 1967 in Tehran. The optimum design parameters such as gas turbine power output, compressor and turbine isentropic efficiency, pressure ratio, and the ratio of turbine inlet temperature to compressor inlet temperature were found by defining an objective function the total cost per unit of repowered plant power output and using numerical search optimization technique for its minimizing. The objective function, the total cost, included initial or capital investment, operation and maintenance costs during plant life cycle. The numerical values of optimum design parameters and the results of the sensitivity analysis are reported.