Patent attributes
A combined cycle power plant (10) that is optimized to reduce total life cycle cost rather than only thermal efficiency. A steam bottoming cycle (16) is fed with exhaust gas (14) from a gas turbine topping cycle (12). The topping cycle incorporates multiple stages of combustion in order to maintain a desired high temperature of the exhaust gas being delivered to the bottoming cycle while at the same time avoiding peak combustion temperatures that would produce undesirable levels of NOx emissions. Accordingly, no post-combustion exhaust gas treatment is needed. In one embodiment, an aspirated compressor (36) provides compressed air to a torus-configured combustion chamber (20) that is integrated with a first stage of vanes (22), and a plurality of stages of in-situ reheat combustion (26, 28) are utilized. In other embodiments, torus-configured combustion chambers may be utilized for more than one of the stages of combustion.
