A Feasibility Study of Inverted Brayton Cycle for Gas Turbine Repowering

In the paper a feasibility study of inverted Brayton cycle (IBC) engines, for the repowering of existing gas turbines, is presented. The following main phases have been carried out: (i) identification of the more suitable gas turbines to be repowered by means of an IBC engine; (ii) designing of the IBC components. Once the IBC engines for the candidate gas turbines were designed, an analysis has been developed to check the possibility to match these engines with other gas turbines, similar to those for which the IBC engines have been designed. In all the analyzed cases the evaluated performance result only slightly worse than that obtainable by repowering the same gas turbine with IBC engines ad hoc designed