Influence of Heat Recovery and Intercooling on Turboprop Engine Behaviour

One of the main aim of gas turbine engine designers is to improve the performances of their power systems, as power attainable or thrust, without increasing fuel consumption too much. To achieve this goal different practices are used, but two of the most effective ones are regeneration and intercooling. The first consists in recovering part of the enthalpy present in exhaust gas to pre heat air before its introduction into the combustion chamber, the second in cooling the air during the compression process so as to reduce the compression work needed, and consequently to obtain more power available at the output shaft. In this paper the behaviour of a turboprop engine has been simulated, by means of a numeric computational program, in which both practices are adopted, studying their effects on the performances, efficiencies and fuel consumption of the engine for different operating conditions.