One of the more critical design aspects addressed in the Design Guide for Combustion Turbine Inlet Air Cooling is the minimum "safe" temperature that should be recommended for a given installation. The current technology proposes different recommendations. If defensible recommendations are not developed for the minimum "safe" inlet air temperatures, one or more of the current inlet air cooling technologies may be arbitrarily excluded from proposed combustion turbine inlet cooling installations. It is essential that this information be obtained for the CTIC design guide.

The objective of this research project is: 1) to use a numerical model to evaluate combustion turbine inlet air cooling temperature depressions and the probability of icing occurrences over a range of typical cooled air temperatures and geometries, and 2) experimentally verify and validate the model results for three existing air inlet design combustion turbine installations.

PRINCAL INVESTIGATOR: William E. Stewart, InterMountain Research
CONDUCTED: April 1998 - April 1999
SPONSORED BY: TG Combustion Gas Turbine Inlet Air Cooling