Potential and Evolution of Miniatures Compressed Air Energy Storage Plants Based on Impulse Turbine

Abstract

This paper describes the work carried out to develop an impulse turbine for miniatures compressed air system. This study hypothesizes the question; what is the effect of combining an impulse turbine loss model into a compressed air energy storage system analysis? The miniatures power system has lower mass flow rates which lead to a small turbine size. The miniature impulse turbine has relatively low efficiency and is highly sensitive to operating conditions at a low mass flow rate due to all losses in terms of passage, trailing edge, incidence, and clearance becoming higher amounts compared to the total losses of the percentage foundation. The development of a novel impulse turbine configuration is presented based on one-dimensional design and three-dimensional simulations. The impulse turbine in single-stage configuration was designed and analyzed for a range of operating conditions in terms of pressures, temperatures, mass flow rate, and rotational speeds. The simulations results showed that the maximum efficiency and power were 65.93% and 4.019 kW respectively with a mass flow rate of 0.2 kg/s. The energy analysis revealed that the system efficiency was 10.3%. The miniature compressed air energy storage system driven by an impulse turbine can be used to generate electricity for small power applications.