Modeling an Evaporative Cooling System to Improve Gas Turbines Performance

Evaporative cooling systems are commonly used in thermoelectric plants to cool the air at gas turbines inlet, improving the performance of these engines. Normally, the evaporative cooling is modeled as adiabatic saturation and, in this case, the water-air equilibrium temperature depends only on the atmospheric air properties. However, other factors such as the water temperature that supplies the equipment and the ratio between the mass flow rates of water and air, also affect the equilibrium conditions of these systems. This work presents three methodologies to calculate the air temperature in equilibrium state, considering all the factors mentioned. The methodologies were implemented in a computer program written in fortran. In all cases tested, the results obtained by the three models showed high convergence. As an example, for 70 different sets of inputs, the absolute and relative differences of the results were below 0.3236 °C and 1.2480%, respectively. A statistical study, also on this sample of results, revealed that, for a confidence level of 99%, the hypothesis of the equivalence between the methods cannot be rejected.