Aerothermal Analysis of a Turbine Casing Impingement Cooling System

Heat transfer and pressure drop for a representative part of a turbine active cooling system were numerically investigated by means of an in-house code. This code has been developed in the framework of an internal research program and has been validated by experiments and CFD. The analysed system represents the classical open bird cage arrangement that consists of an air supply pipe with a control valve and the present system with a collector box and pipes, which distribute cooling air in circumferential direction of the casing. The cooling air leaves the ACC system through small holes at the bottom of the tubes. These tubes extend at about 180° around the casing and may involve a huge number of impinging holes; as a consequence, the impinging jets mass flow rate may vary considerably along the feeding manifold with a direct impact on the achievable heat transfer levels. This study focuses on the performance, in terms of heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop, of several impinging tube geometries. As a result of this analysis, several design solutions have been compared and discussed

Development of an optimization algorithm for the energy management of an industrial Smart User

The growth of world energy demand combined with global warming and climate change is one of the most urgent global challenges and induced policy measures to foster the use of renewable energy sources. In order to cope with the intrinsic variability of solar and wind, active management of distribution networks and customers is required, if the creation of the so called Smart Grid is desired. This paper focuses on the strategies to enable prosumers (i.e. customers able to self-generate all or part of their energy needs) to optimally manage their generation and loads in order to minimize their energy bill and, at the same time, support the distribution grid stability by responding flexibly to its requirements in terms of active load management. In this study an industrial prosumer equipped with solar and wind generation as well as with a co-generation unit with absorption chiller and heat/cold storage was considered. The work presents an optimization algorithm that was developed and applied to this Smart User to manage operations of the CHP in order to optimize the power generation and the usage depending on internal and external inputs as loads, weather forecast and price from the electricity and natural gas market. The proposed algorithm was tested with real experimental inputs of different typical days and its performance was compared with three common scenarios, i.e. traditional supply, electric load following and thermal load following operation of the CHP. Results compare the different control strategies of the CHP (i.e. thermal and electric load following) and shows economic advantages allowed by means of the optimization algorithm, which appears to be an effective instrument to prepare prosumers to the smart grid of the future