Customer Support>Recent Releases>TFLOW 8 update letter

July 12, 2002

Dear Customer,

The enclosed CD, which will install by default in a TFLOW8 directory, bears THERMOFLEX 5.2, GT PRO/GT MASTER/PEACE 10.9, STEAM PRO/STEAM MASTER/RE-MASTER 5.4, and miscellaneous ancillary programs.

This update further expands the engineering capabilities in THERMOFLEX/PEACE, especially for Heat Recovery Boilers.  It provides expanded flexibility in GT PRO/GT MASTER/PEACE for detailed design of Heat Recovery Boilers as well as increased accuracy in the Steam Turbine model, with a more comprehensive treatment of leakages.  The updates to each program are summarised below.

THERMOFLEX Version 5.2

Due to increasing use of our software by HRSG manufacturers, the engineered PEACE components within THERMOFLEX have been expanded to provide a flexible, detailed platform for thermal design and simulation of HRSG’s.  The notion of declaring a HRSG Assembly has been implemented, allowing GT PRO-level preliminary drawings and estimates to be made for entire HRSG’s, which may be declared to consist of THERMOFLEX/PEACE components.

The new THERMOFLEX/PEACE developments are described in the enclosed manual supplements, to be inserted at the end of Chapters 13 and 15 of the existing manual.  These are summarised below:

1) Greater flexibility for the Economiser, Evaporator, Superheater and Integral Deaerator components, to make the models more flexible and user-friendly for HRSG designers. (§15.6).

2) A new OTB Element component, to allow flexible, detailed modelling of Once-Through Boilers, either subcritical or supercritical. (§15.7).

3) A new HRSG Assembly system allows the user to assemble complete HRSG’s in THERMOFLEX, which then have preliminary drawings, size, weight and cost estimates for the entire boiler. (§15.8).

4) A new Stack component has been developed to work with the HRSG Assembly. (§13.5).

5) A new SCR/CO Catalyst component has been developed to work with the HRSG Assembly. (§13.6).

Further work is underway in THERMOFLEX for the conceptual engineering of Conventional Boilers, at a level similar to that now in place for Heat Recovery Boilers.  The new Rotary Air Heater component has been included in the present version (5.2) and many enhancements have been implemented to the Radiant Boiler component, also available in this version (5.2).  However, detailed description of these components has been deferred until the work on Conventional Boilers, including their Assembly logic, has been completed.  This is scheduled for later in 2002.

GT PRO/GT MASTER/PEACE Versions 10.9

Many new features have been added to Version 10.9 of the Advanced Developer’s System, which will be re-released as Version 11 later this year.  The enhancements are described in the enclosed manual supplement and summarised below:

(1) Steam Turbine:  The new features are described in §1 of the enclosed manual supplement:

(a) Ability to dictate physical turbine casing arrangement, necessary for detailed leakage modelling and for a more physically based, new, cost estimation procedure in PEACE.  An automatic option is available to let the program logically select the arrangement. (§1.1).

(b) The flexibility in defining the steam turbine parameters on a group-by-group basis has been included in GT PRO, along with the ability to designate auto-extraction controls at the design-point.  Previoulsy these features were only available in GT MASTER. (§1.3).

(c) Detailed treatment of steam turbine leakage flows has been included in GT PRO and GT MASTER, bringing them to the same level of detail as in STEAM PRO and STEAM MASTER.  Although the impact on final results is very small, on the order of 0.1% on combined cycle output, this is a feature that many detail-oriented customers had asked for during the past few years. (§1.4).

(d) Detailed treatment of the turbine seal steam system has been included in GT PRO and GT MASTER, bringing them to the same level of detail as in STEAM PRO and STEAM MASTER. (§1.5).

(e) The method of estimating steam turbine size, weight and cost has been enhanced, to consider additional features of the physical design than earlier versions.

(2) Heat Recovery Boiler:  The new features are described in §2 of the enclosed manual supplement:

(a) Flexibility for the user to dictate steam flow rates, rather than pinch-points, for condensing cycles at the design point.  GT PRO will then compute the corresponding pinch-points.  Previously, this was only possible for non-condensing cycles. (§2.1).

(b) Flexibility for the user to dictate cold reheat conditions in reheat cycles at the design point, rather than have the program compute them from the HP steam turbine efficiency.  GT PRO would then compute the corresponding HPT efficiency, and warn if unreasonable. (§2.2).

(c) Additional options for HRSG duct sizing criteria.  Ten methods are available, covering every reasonable combination of aspect ratio, gas mass flux, and tube length as independent input parameters. (§2.3).

(d) Additional options for HRSG hardware design logic, including the ability to instruct GT PRO to vary fin density as it iterates on boiler design to secure an integer number of rows and tubes per row. (§2.4).

(e) Flexibility for the user to conveniently include desuperheating at the design point.  Previously, this was accomplished via imposing water additions at given flow rates, which some found inconvenient to use. (§2.5).

(f) Improved automatic design procedures, developed through cooperation with major boiler manufacturers, to let GT PRO, automatically and with all defaults, produce designs very close to typical practice, especially for vertical boilers.  Previously, the user had to know and manually enter the appropriate tubing details to obtain surface areas in close agreement with the manufacturers’.

(3) Other Enhancements:  These are described in §3 of the enclosed manual supplement:

(a) Greater flexibility in defining non-condensing combined cycles. (§3.1).

(b) A new functionality to automatically “tweak” GT PRO’s gas turbine model, to cause it to agree with vendor specs known to the user, and which differ slightly from the program’s model.  Previously, the user had to manually introduce the adjustments, and some users found this too difficult. (§3.2).

STEAM PRO/STEAM MASTER/RE-MASTER Versions 5.4

The integration of PEACE into an expanded STEAM PRO/STEAM MASTER is proceeding as planned, and is expected to be available later this year.  In the present release, the only changes are various fixes of a few bugs that have been discovered.

Gas Turbine Data Base Update

The GT data base used by the various Thermoflow products has been updated, as follows:

Cost Estimation Procedures Update

Since gas turbine prices are not officially published by manufacturers, and are subject to negotiation, Thermoflow has always relied on a popular public domain source for gas turbine prices, the Gas Turbine World Handbook.  In the present release, the basic gas turbine prices are from the latest issue of this handbook, Volume 22, received in April, 2002.  Due to recent market conditions, however, it is common knowledge that prices for the larger gas turbines have dropped.  Thus, we have introduced a correction factor to the GTW Handbook values.  This factor is 0.9 for the largest sizes, and 1 for machines below 10 MW, and follows a log-linear interpolation in between.  The resulting price estimates from this procedure are still thought to be conservative (high) as of July, 2002.

The steam turbine cost model has been fundamentally revised, and estimates from the new version have been reduced to be closer to current market conditions.  The programs’ cost estimates are still thought to be somewhat conservative (high) as of July, 2002, at least for the sizes commonly used in large combined cycles.  The HRSG cost model has also been revised, and is believed to be reasonable, but the uncertain nature of the present market in large combined cycle equipment makes it hard to quantify its accuracy.

Naturally, the user should rely on information from our software for preliminary estimates only, and should obtain direct quotes from the manufacturers for any detailed economic analysis