Off-design performances of a gas turbine engine with heat recovery and intercooling

The reduction of fuel consumption and pollutant emissions have become one of the main requirements of modern gas turbine aero engines. To pursue this aim engineers are developing new techniques to improve the efficiency of the thermodynamic cycle of new engines. In particular the attention is focused on the possibility to introduce practices as heat regeneration and staged-intercooled compression process on these engines. These practices, that change considerably the features of the working cycle of the engine, are well known and widely used in ground based power plants, but until now they have not been transferred on aero engines, mainly for problems of extra weight and size. However now these problems seem to be overcome by new technology, and the possibility to have intercooled-recuperated gas turbine engines on a plane has become real. A thermodynamic code that simulates the behavior of a gas turbine engine at different engine and operating conditions has been developed. In this paper are presented the main results obtained with the code, simulating the behavior of a turboprop engine in which both intercooling and regeneration are introduced. An off-design analysis is then performed to compare the behavior difference between the two engines when operate at different conditions respect to the design point. © 2012 by Roberto Andriani.