Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Design and Selection-Driver
Design and Selection-Driver
A turbine is a rotary engine that extracts energy from a fluid flow. For
example, a steam turbine extracts the thermal energy in high
temperature and high pressure steam into mechanical energy.
Similarly, a gas turbine extracts the energy from the combustion
process (of gas/liquid fuel) into mechanical energy.
Steam turbines
Gas turbines
Turbo-expander – also known as expansion turbine
Steam chest – steam enters the inlet flange into the steam chest.
2 key components in the steam chest
o Trip/stop valve – to protect the turbine from overspeeding
o Governor valve – controls the turbine speed
Steam end – from the steam chest, the steam enters the steam end which contains
the nozzles to accelerate the steam to high velocity, directing the steam to the
turbine blades mounted on the rotor. (Please note the figure above is single stage,
but there could be several stages of nozzle-blade arrangement)
State 3 – 4 : isentropic
compression
State 4 – 5 - 1 : isobaric heating
State 1 – 2 : isentropic expansion
State 2 – 3 : isothermal
condensation
5 1
2
3
S
State 3 – State 4: Liquid is pumped from low pressure to high pressure by the boiler
feed water pump.
State 4 – State 1: High pressure liquid enters a boiler where it is heated at constant
pressure (isobaric heating) to become dry saturated vapor.
State 1 – State 2: The saturated vapor (at high pressure and high temperature)
expands through a turbine, generating mechanical energy.
State 2 – State 3: The wet vapor enters a condenser and is condensed at constant
pressure and temperature to become saturated liquid.
NOTE: Other “tweaks” to this cycle: non-ideal Rankine cycle, reheat cycle,
regenerative cycle.
Air intake
Compressor
Combustor
Turbine
Barring gear (or "turning gear") is the mechanism provided to rotate the turbine
shaft at a very low speed after unit stoppages. Once the unit is "tripped" (i.e., the
steam inlet valve is closed), the turbine coasts down towards standstill. When it
stops completely, there is a tendency for the turbine shaft to deflect or bend if
allowed to remain in one position too long. This is because the heat inside the
turbine casing tends to concentrate in the top half of the casing, making the top half
portion of the shaft hotter than the bottom half. The shaft therefore could warp or
bend by millionths of inches.
This small shaft deflection, only detectable by eccentricity meters, would be enough
to cause damaging vibrations to the entire steam turbine unit when it is restarted.
The shaft is therefore automatically turned at low speed (about one revolution per
minute) by the barring gear until it has cooled sufficiently to permit a complete stop.
12)What are the main components of a turboexpander? – see diagram
above
13)How does an expander work? – see item 11.
Another point to note is that the exhaust gas from the turboexpander
(gas out) is at a very low temperature, sometimes as low as -90 deg
Celsius or less. Therefore, turboexpanders are widely used as a source
for refrigeration, for example, in extraction of ethane and natural gas
liquids.