This is an excerpt from a technical paper, presented at the ASME Turbo Expo 2020 online conference and written by Leonid Moroz, Maksym Burlaka, Tishun Zhang, and Olga Altukhova. Follow the link at the end of the post to read the full study!
Introduction
The attempts to simulate transient and steady-state sCO2 cycles off-design performance were performed by numerous authors [1], [2], [3], [4], and [5]. Some of them studied the dynamic behavior of regulators, some studied different control strategies or off-design behavior in different scenarios, which definitely has certain utility in the development of the reliable technology of sCO2 cycle simulation. Nevertheless, they used rather simplified models of components, especially turbomachinery and heat exchangers, which are of crucial importance to correctly simulate cycle performance.
The authors of this paper attempted to apply the digital twin concept to a simulation of off-design and part-load modes of the sCO2 bottoming cycle considering real machine characteristics and performance, which nobody tried to apply in this area.
On IGTC Japan 2015, SoftInWay Inc. has published a paper “Evaluation of Gas Turbine Exhaust Heat Recovery Utilizing Composite Supercritical CO2 Cycle”. The paper considered combinations of different bottoming sCO2 cycles for a specific middle power gas turbine. It mainly studied the advantages of different types of sCO2 cycles to increase the power production utilizing GTU waste heat.
The present paper is a further study based on that so the Cycle 2 [6] from that previous paper was selected as the sCO2 bottoming PGU layout in the present paper for subsequent analysis. The cycle is a combination of recompression cycle and simple cycle which offers 16.13 MW as output. GE LM6000-PH DLE gas turbine, was used as the heat source for bottoming PGU. According to GE official brochure [7], the GE LM6000 offers 40 MW to over 50 MW with up to 42% efficiency and 99% fleet reliability in a flexible, compact package design for utility, industrial and oil and gas applications. GE LM6000-PH DLE provides 53.26 MW output with exhaust temperature at 471 ℃ and exhaust flow at 138.8 kg/s. (This information came from GE products specification from 2015. It appears that GE continuously modifying the parameters of its turbines along with the naming of different modifications. Therefore, today’s parameters and configuration names might be slightly different comparing to 2015) Exhaust gas pressure was assumed to be 0.15 MPa. These parameters were taken to analyze the bottoming PGU and are presented below in TABLE 1.

The digital twin (DT) concept is the developing technology that allows simulation of object behavior during its life cycle or in specified time due to changing ambient conditions, for example. The DT is applicable for performance tuning, digital machine building, healthcare, smart cities, etc [8] that allows decreasing the time and costs of development and optimize the object on the developing stage. GE has raised DT concepts for power plants to continually improves its ability to model and track the state of the plants [9].
In the context of this paper, DT is a simulation system comprised of physicist-based models organized in a special algorithmic structure that allows simulating the behavior of sCO2 PGU under alternating ambient conditions and grid demands.
The DT in this study was created utilizing AxSTREAM® Platform, which includes multiple software tools. The following software tools were utilized in this study: AxCYCLE™ was used to perform cycle thermodynamic calculation; solution generator in AxSTREAM® helped with finding possible machine geometry with given boundary conditions when performing preliminary design for compressors and turbines at design point; parameters and performance of turbomachinery including mass flow rate, pressure, power, efficiencies, etc. were calculated by Meanline/Streamline solver in AxSTREAM® for design and off-design conditions; AxSTREAM NET™ is a 1D system modeling solver and it was introduced here to simulate performance of heat exchangers (HEX) and pressure drop in the pipes involved in the cycle; AxSTREAM ION™ was used to integrate all modules and tools together in one simulation system. Read More