Effects of intercooling and regeneration in the performance of a turbofan engine

• Autor(a) principal: Lebre, João
• Data de Publicação: 2010
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/3687
• topic: Turbofan; Permutador de calor - Compressor de alta pressão - Aeronaves; Permutador de calor - Regenerador; Gases poluentes - Aeronaves

The modern aviation is being questioned due to high emission of gases in the atmosphere. The introduction of heat exchangers for engines with two spools could be one of the solutions to this problem. One of the heat exchangers is the intercooler that is intended to cool the air when it leaves the low pressure compressor. After cooled air enters the high pressure compressor, causing a decrease in the compression work of the high pressure compressor. The other heat exchanger is the regenerator which is located in the hot nozzle. This exchanger, heat the air before entry in the combustion chamber. The air exits the high pressure compressor and it is heated by the exhaust gases before entering the combustion chamber. This increase in temperature causes a decrease in specific fuel consumption. These two components are already used in ground power plants and they were not used in aircraft because of the extra weight and size. The use of the heat exchangers could be justified, if the reduction in the specific fuel consumption and increase of efficiency and specific thrust are worthwhile when compared to the penalty introduced by the extra weight. In this work is compared the performance parameters of a conventional engine with the ones of three configurations intended to increase the global performance of the engine. These three configurations use intercooler, regenerator or both. The comparison is performed to show the influence of engine parameters in specific fuel consumption, specific thrust and thermal efficiency. So it shows which is the best engine configuration to be used for the lower specific fuel consumption with the same specific thrust of the conventional engine.