Numerical Investigation on Efficiency of Inertial Sand Separators of a Gas Turbine

Gas turbine inlet air is filtered in multiple steps. First, the filtration step is used for removing the big things. Then, Sand and dust are removed using the inertial sand separators. Sand separators filtration system is composed of 30 rows of the inertial sand separators on 5 floors. In this paper, one floor of the inertial sand separators filtration system of Shahid Kave power plant has been simulated using Ansys Fluent 16. A computational server with 20 processing cores and RAM of 120 GB was used to carry out the calculations. The velocity and pressure fields have been studied and the effect of density and diameter of particles on inertial sand separators efficiency are investigated. Particle diameter and density are varied between 0.1 to 100 micrometer and 500 to 2000 kg/m3 respectively. The result shows that the collection efficiency of the inertial sand separators was reduced by increasing the particle diameter. However, the collection efficiency of the inertial sand separators was improved by increasing the particle density. Also, a few particles are collected by inertial sand separators, so that collection efficiency is less than 1%. Therefore, this system is inefficient and not cost-effective and elimination of the system fans could reduce the energy consumption of the gas power plant around 360 kW.