THE VIRTUAL GAS TURBINE SYSTEM FOR ALLOY ASSESMENT

In the "High Temperature Materials 21” (HTM21) project, we developed a virtual gas turbine (VT) system as a combination of an alloy design program and a gas turbine design program. The VT is a simplified automatic gas turbine simulation program that can be used on personal computers. The VT performs simplified aerodynamic, cooling, and structural analysis calculations based on preset design parameters, which were tuned for a medium-size 1300°C-class land-base gas turbine. By using the VT, we estimate the plant performance (thermal efficiency, CO2 emission rate, etc.) as well as the life of the components, such as the creep rupture life of blades, for any new superalloys with arbitrary alloy compositions. In this study, the following alloys were evaluated in the VT with the turbine inlet gas temperature (TIT) up to 1700°C : Rene-N5 and TMS-82+ ; (second-generation SC superalloys), and TMS-138 and TMS-138++ ; (fourth- and fifth-generation SC superalloys containing Ru).