Comparison of model-driven soft measurement methods for compressor air flow in gas-steam combined cycle power units

The determination of the air flowrate at the compressor inlet is meaningful for the performance diagnosis of heavy-duty gas turbine combined cycle (GTCC) power units, whereas the compressor air flow generally cannot be directly obtained from the field data. In this paper, the procedures of three model-driven methods for soft measurement of compressor air flow were presented, including energy balance of the coupled HRSG (M1), static pressure at the compressor manifold (M2) and gas turbine joint operation line method (M3). In the case of a M701F4 GTCC power unit, the methods M1 and M3 were validated by the field and testing data; while the method M2 was calibrated and the effective area at the air manifold was decided as 12.606 m2 using M1 at the full load of gas turbine. The compressor air mass flow at overall loads was computed with the various methods. The comparative investigation to these methods shows that, the compressor inlet air flow is determined as 682.75 kg/s by M1 and 664.07 kg/s by M3, respectively, at the full load and at the ambient temperature 29.912 °C. The air flow obtained by M1 and M2 appears relatively higher than that by M3 at typical various loads of gas turbine; however, the method M3 shows a good accordance with the actual value of the air flow for turbine rotor cooling. Both M2 and M3 agree in the theoretical demonstration that compressor air flow is strongly related to the gas turbine load at certain conditions. The method M1 can be deemed as a reference for another two methods in the case of the steady operating state at full load; whereas it is not recommendable for the real-time measurement of compressor air flow, because of the large amounts of required input variables and the fluctuation in the flow meters.