A high efficiency heat exchanger for closed cycle and heat recovery gas turbines

Designing and manufacturing high-efficiency heat exchangers is usually considered a limiting factor in the development of both heat recovery Joule-Brayton cycles and closed-cycle (external combustion) gas turbine plants. In this work, an innovative heat exchanger is proposed, modeled and partially tested to validate the developed numerical model employed for its design. The heat exchanger is based on an intermediate medium (aluminum oxide Al2O3) flowing in counter-current through an hot stream of gas. In this process, heat can be absorbed from the hot gas, temporarily stored and then similarly released in a second pipe, where a cold stream is warmed up. A flow of alumina particles with very small diameter (of the order of hundreds of micron) can be employed to enhance the heat transfer. Experimental tests demonstrate that simple one-dimensional steady equations, also neglecting conduction in the particles, can be effectively employed to simulate the flow in the vertical part of the pipe, namely to compute the pipe length required to achieve a prescribed heat exchange. On the other side, full threedimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations have been performed to demonstrate that a more thorough gas flow and particle displacement analysis is needed to avoid some geometrical details that may cause a bad distribution of alumina particles, and thus to achieve high thermal efficiency.