Turbine inlet cooling with thermal energy storage

Turbine inlet cooling (TIC) is a common technology used to increase combustion turbine power output and efficiency. The use of mechanical or absorption chillers for TIC allows for more air cooling than evaporative methods and also imposes a significant parasitic load to the turbine. Thermal energy storage (TES) can be used to shift this load to off-peak hours. Use of thermal storage increases the flexibility of turbine power output, which benefits from the application of optimization tools. This paper explores the effect of combining TIC with TES to enhance the performance of a district cooling system that includes a gas turbine for power generation. The work illustrates how the system's performance can be enhanced using optimization. Application of multi-period optimization to the system that includes TES brings significant operational cost savings when compared with a system without thermal storage. It is also shown how TES provides demand-side energy management in the district cooling loop and supply-side management through the use of TIC. In addition to the optimization study, a thorough literature review is included that describes the current body of work on combining TIC with TES. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.