Thermodynamic Characteristics of a CVC Turbine Engine with Heat Recovery

Modern gas turbines operate according to the Brayton thermodynamic cycle, in which the combustion process takes place at constant pressure. However, at the beginning of the last century, the German engineer Hans Holtzwarth built a turbine in which combustion took place in a closed volume, in a similar way to what happens in piston engines, and the operating cycle of this engine, with constant volume combustion (CVC), is the Humphrey cycle. Today, thanks also to the development of electronic control systems, this gas turbine cycle has attracted new interest, as it promises to achieve high efficiencies. The regeneration of the heat present in the turbine exhaust is a technique, widely used in the industrial field, being studied in the aeronautical field, which allows to greatly increase the gas turbine energy efficiency, significantly reducing fuel consumption, and consequently the formation of some pollutants. In this work, through the development of a thermodynamic numeric program, which performs a parametric analysis of the working cycle, the effect on performance and efficiency of the use of the practice of regeneration in a gas turbine with constant volume combustion is studied.