Improving Air-Cooled Condenser Performance in Combined Cycle Power Plants

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
It has been recognized in recent times that air-cooled condensers (ACCs) are environmentally preferable to the traditional water-cooled condensers for rejecting heat in combined-cycle power plants (CCPPs). However, a drawback of ACCs is that their performance can decline with increasing ambient air temperature. A new approach is proposed in this paper that has the potential to alleviate this drawback of ACCs. In this approach, a chilled-water thermal energy storage system (TES) is used to precool the inflow air to the ACC whenever the ambient air temperature increases above the design air inlet temperature. The temperature of the TES system is maintained by an absorption refrigeration system (ARS) driven by low-quality waste heat from the CCPP. A process model integrating the CCPP with the ARS and the TES has been developed to optimize the volume of the TES. A 500 MW CCPP with steam turbine net output of 170.9 MW was chosen to evaluate the application of this approach for a power plant to be located in so...

This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit: