Thermodynamic optimization of a reheat chemically recuperated gas turbine

The feasibility of integrating a commercially available reheat gas turbine with a methane steam reformer is analyzed. A slight modification to the original reheat design is proposed to improve the methane conversion rate in the reforming process and, consequently, the efficiency in recovering waste exhaust heat from the gas turbine. Two solutions are proposed for the heat recovery scheme: a first reformer has a single pressure level while the second has two in order to match the different pressures of the combustors. While the single pressure scheme gives good performance with respect to the stand alone gas turbine, the dual pressure reformer can give a further benefit, as far as an accurate optimization of the steam management is performed. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.