Nowadays, the sustainability achievements are becoming an essential target of innovation and technology development. In the industrial scenario, the Gas Turbine operation is one of the main contributors to CO2 emissions. In a Gas Turbine life cycle, the CO2 emissions can increase due to the larger amount of fuel requested to contrast the effect of drops in efficiency. Gas Turbine axial compressor fouling is known as the source of about 70 \~ 85 % of the performance degradation of the whole engine. To recover large part of these losses, water washing processes are commonly adopted in industrial Gas Turbines. Two types of water washings are currently used: on-line and off-line. Recently, it has been demonstrated the effectiveness of a new High Flow On-line Water Washing (HFOLWW). By maintaining the GT axial compressors efficiency almost constant in time, HFOWW permits to further decrease the fuel consumption needed to balance the efficiency losses, eventually reducing CO2 emission.

In the present work, field data were analyzed to make a comparison of the GT operating conditions before and after the introduction of the new high flow on-line water washing process. An LCA assessment was carried out using SimaPro to assess the impact of both the different water washing methodologies and their effect on the Gas Turbine operation. The analyses cover the entire system including the GT, the skid pump, the water treatment and the heaters.


Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of Different Gas Turbine Axial Compressor Water Washing Systems

Division / Sponsor:
International Gas Turbine Institute (IGTI)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/GT2020/volume/84058

Turbo Expo - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.