Study of a coal-fired transonic disk MHD generator for a power system with CO2 recovery

A conceptual design of a transonic disk MHD channel is carried out for a power generation system with liquefaction recovery of CO2. A previous study has shown that the subsonic disk MHD channel has rather poor performance and the supersonic disk channel yields sufficiently high power output, although its stability should be improved. The present paper proposes a transonic disk channel which can be stably operated with high power output. It is assumed that the transition between supersonic flow and subsonic flow is accompanied by a cylindrical shock wave in the channel. The transonic channel yields enthalpy extraction ratios of 20.2 and 22.9%, respectively, for thermal inputs of 1100 and 2000 MW, and is nearly equal to the performance of the supersonic channel. The stability of the transonic disk channel is examined by r-theta two-dimensional time-dependent calculations. The two-dimensional analysis shows that the transonic disk channel works stably with fewer load sections than the supersonic channel even when inlet perturbations are added. (C) 1998 Scripta Technica.