Modelling of microturbine systems

The paper describes the development of a dynamic model of a microturbine system. The paper was done in close cooperation with the gas turbine manufacturer Turbec AB and the model was tuned and verified against their microturbine system T100. The microturbine unit consists of a compressor and a turbine connected on a single shaft to a high-speed generator. The model includes all the main thermodynamic and mechanical components of the microturbine. Possible applications for the model are development of control strategies, dynamic performance verification, operator training and control software/hardware verification. The emphasis has been on the functionality and accuracy of the system model and not of the component models. The model is written in the Modelica modelling language and uses, when available, components from the standard libraries or from previous work as [11] and [6]. Steady-state verification has been done with good results. When the microturbine runs at full load of 100 kW, there is an average error of 0.6 % for the 13 most important thermodynamic variables compared to reference values. Dynamic verification in three different experiments has been done and the model shows a good fit to the measured data from the real microturbine.