Performance of an oxy-fuel combustion CO2 power cycle including blades cooling

The MATIANT cycle concept tries to guarantee a high level of performance, as can be obtained by today’s advanced power plants, together with CO2 separation in conditions ready for transport and final disposal. The cycle combines oxycombustion – thereby allowing CO2 separation by simple cooling of the combustion products – with extensive cycle regeneration and fractioned expansions/compressions, making use of new components, technology and materials upgraded from modern gas turbine engines. In order to provide realistic results, the power plant performance should include the effects of blade cooling. In the present work an advanced cooled expansion model has been included in the model of the MATIANT cycle in order to assess the effects of blade cooling over the cycle efficiency. The results show that the penalty in efficiency about 3 percentage points, mainly due to the reheat process, which, on the other hand, leads to a consistent improvement in specific work (around 40%). On the whole, the cycle performance is attractive considering that most other power cycles undergo a much larger penalty in efficiency when carbon sequestration is included.