Gas turbine performance studies for LH₂-fuelled engines.

Abstract

The aim of this Individual Research Project is to lay solid foundations for the investigation of liquid hydrogen utilisation in aero gas turbines employing Cranfield University’s Turbomatch software. To this day, including key components like heat exchangers is considerably limited in this software. As heat exchangers are believed to be vital in order to take advantage of the unique properties of liquid hydrogen, this thesis aims to create the possibility to carry out investigations in this field without depending on similar tools from outside Cranfield University. To do so, a code is created in Matlab to serve as a heat exchanger library in which key parameters like outlet temperatures, overall pressure drops or geometrical characteristics are calculated in a split second. This code is validated, and results obtained from it are shown, compared and discussed. Different engine configurations are modelled in Turbomatch (in which the location of the heat exchangers is varied from one model to the other). The outputs from the code are introduced in these Turbomatch models and simulations are run. Results from these simulations are plotted and analysed, highlighting the impact of these heat exchangers according to the location they are on. Finally, some conclusions are extracted from all of the above and recommendations for future researches are listed.