Ultra micro gas turbine generator

1. Introduction
The current trend towards miniaturization, portability and more in general ubiquitous intelligence,
has led to the development of a wide range of new products such as laptops, cellular phones,
PDAs, etc. However, the power requirements of such systems have received much less
attention: typically, traditional battery-operated electronic systems are used. Nevertheless, the
energy density of most fuel types is still 100 times more than that of the most performing
batteries, which makes the use of a fuel-based micro power unit interesting. Such power units
can be based on a wide range of operating principles, ranging from fuel cells and thermo-electric
devices, to combustion engines and gas turbines. While fuel cells are expected to offer the
highest efficiency, micro gas turbines are expected to offer the highest power density.
A first prototype of a turbine driven by compressed air shows that speed is the limiting factor for
both power and efficiency. The next step, the development of a complete gas turbine, is many
times more difficult, and is not simply the scaling down of larger gas turbines. Major problems
are the high rotational speed (> 500,000 rpm) and temperature (> 1200 K), and the efficiency of
the components.

2. Micro gas turbine

Gas turbines are amongst the most advanced systems as they combine extreme conditions in
terms of rotational speed with elevated gas temperatures (up to 2100 K for military engines).
Miniaturisation of such a system poses tremendous technical problems as it leads to extremely
high rotational speeds (e.g. 106 rpm). Moreover scaling down the system unfavourably influences
the flow and combustion process. Fabricating such devices requires new materials to be
explored (such as Si3N4 and SiC) and also requires three-dimensional micromanufacturing
processes.
The micro gas turbine developed by the Belgian PowerMEMS project has a rotor diameter of 20
mm and will produce a power output of about 1000 W. The system basically consists of a
compressor, regenerator, combustion chamber, turbine and electrical generator, as illustrated in
figure 1.

Figure 1: Gas turbine generator layout.

Figure 1 shows the general layout of the microturbine generator. The system basically consists
of a compressor, recuperator, combustion chamber, turbine and electrical generator. In total it
has a diameter of around 100 mm and a length of 110 mm. The compressor and turbine
impellers are 20 mm in diameter.
In order to accomodate the relatively large volume of both the combustion chamber and the
recuperator in a compact way, an annular design was chosen for both components. As a
consequence of the adopted layout, the hottest part - the combustion chamber - is enclosed by
the recuperator on the outside and by the exhaust diffuser on the inside. This allows to recycle
heat losses from the combustion chamber. An exhaust diffuser is added to create a sub-ambient
pressure at the turbine exit, such that more power can be extracted.

To avoid demagnetisation of the magnets, the generator is located away from the hot parts and
the inlet air is aspirated through cooling channels in the generator stator. Generator, compressor
and turbine are mounted on a single shaft for simplicity and reliability.

3. Thermodynamic cycle
The thermodynamic cycle has been determined and optimised in an iterative way. Fixed values
are the compressor diameter (20 mm), nominal shaft speed and max. turbine inlet temperature
(TIT). The max. TIT is set by material limits to 1200 K. The nominal shaft speed was set to
500,000 rpm as models predicted that with the given compressor diameter, a pressure ratio of 3
is achievable. Below this value efficiency drops sharply, while higher values offer smaller
efficiency improvements.
A detailed gas turbine model was built containing compressor and turbine maps, and models for
the combustion chamber and recuperator. An iterative process was used to optimise the
efficiency of the individual components as well as the global cycle. The following parameters
were obtained:

Nominal mass flow: 20 g/s

Pressure ratio: 3.0
Power
o Compressor: 3800 W
o Turbine: 5083 W
o Net
mechanical
output: 1180 W
t-s polytropic efficiency
o Compressor: 66 %
o Turbine: 78 %
Turbine inlet temperature:
1200 K
Cycle efficiency
o Without recuperation:
11 %
o

With recuperation: 20
Fig. 2: Mechanical power vs. speed and turbine inlet
%
temperature (TIT) (without recuperator).

While the primary goal of the optimisation was the maximisation of the cycle efficiency, a major
result was an enlargement of mass flow and power, this way reducing thermal and flow losses in
a relative sense.
An off-design analysis has been performed to investigate stability, transient behaviour and startup. Figure 2 shows the mechanical power as function of speed and TIT, indicating that a minimal
TIT of 600 K is required for start-up.

4. Bearings
The bearings must operate throughout the whole domain of possible temperature conditions
during startup and in steady state operation. Maximum temperatures between 100C and
1000C can be expected depending on the exact location of the bearings.

Rotor unbalance can result in dangerously high dynamic radial loading, and therefore, the
eccentricity of the mass centre should be balanced within a few micrometer.
It is clear that conventional ball bearings are not feasible regarding speed and temperature.
Magnetic bearings could offer a solution regarding speed, but the high temperature dissuades
the use of permanent magnets as these could demagnetise. Consequently, such bearings
should be constructed with electromagnets which consume a considerable amount of electrical
energy.
Air bearings seem most suited for this application. Aerostatic as well as aerodynamic ones can
be used. Aerostatic bearings can be fed by tapping a small amount of compressed air from the
compressor. This results in problems at startup and moreover decreases the overall efficiency.
Aerodynamic bearings are self-pressurising and therefore need no external supply. However, the
phase of dry friction during startup is a major drawback. Additionally, self-excited instabilities
(half-speed whirl) limit the maximum attainable speed.
For the application presented here, aerodynamic bearings are the most promising choice on
condition that the issue of instability is tackled.
It is generally known that an unloaded or lightly loaded aerodynamic bearing has a strong
tendency towards self-excited vibrations at high speeds. Small-scale systems very often
encounter this problem as with miniaturisation rotor mass goes down much faster than bearing
load capacity. Several stabilizing techniques exist, but most promising for this application are
bearings with conformable surfaces, more specifically aerodynamic foil bearings. These bearings
are virtually immune to half-speed whirl and suffer less from centrifugal and thermal rotor growth.
Current work focuses on designing new foil bearing concepts, suitable for small dimensions.

5. Compressor and turbine

As stated before, the efficiency of all components is critical. This is especially true for the
compressor and turbine, requiring efficiencies of at least 60-70%, values lying far above the
numbers obtained for the former air driven turbine. Thus, it is clearly a challenge to obtain the
required efficiency despite the low Reynolds numbers, increased heat transfer, and lower relative
geometric accuracy of the components. The compressor and turbine impellers have been
optimized by a multi-disciplinary method, optimizing simultaneously stress and aerodynamic
performance. The resulting geometries are shown in figure 3.

Fig. 3: Stresses in optimized compressor and turbine geometries.

Compressor Turbine
t-s efficiency
66 %
78 %
t-t efficiency
68 %
81 %
Max. von Mises stress 364 MPa
458 MPa
Power
3800 W
5083 W

6. Recuperator
Heat recuperation is often used to improve the overall cycle efficiency of standard gas turbines.
In small-sized gas turbines this improvement is however much more questionable. Indeed, both
achievable compressor pressure ratios and turbine inlet temperatures are significantly lower and
pressure drops are much larger compared to conventionally sized gas turbines. The additional
pressure drop introduced by the small channels in the recuperator should not undo the benefits
of heat recuperation.
In conventionally sized recuperators, complex, well designed fin configurations are used in order
to improve the gas-air heat transfer. In order to avoid these costly and difficult to machine fin
configurations, alternative recuperator designs are needed for microscale applications.
The recuperator consists of 6 identical blocks positioned around the gas turbine. The design is
determined by a multi-dimensional optimization in which cold and hot side recuperator pressure
drops are used as optimization parameters [9]. The optimal design has a heat exchanger
effectiveness of 74.5 % for relative pressure drops at cold and hot side of 8.5 kPa and 5.5 kPa
respectively. The recuperator blocks consist of alternating hot and cold plates (52 in total), with
longitudinal channels in counterflow (see fig. 6). Channels and collectors are etched with a
uniform depth in stainless steel plates, 63 by 25 mm in size. Total stack height is 34 mm.

Fig. 6: Stacked recuperator block and individual hot and cold plates.

7. Generator
The generator operates at much higher speeds and temperatures than conventionally. For
reasons of mechanical strength (centrifugal load), a switched reluctance machine is chosen for
the generator. Permanent magnets and coils are placed on the stator to avoid damage resulting
from high stresses. The temperature load is minimised as the generator is located at the lowest
temperature side of the device (the compressor side) and by extra cooling with the inlet air.
The high speed results also in high operating frequencies which introduce skin effects in the
electrical circuit and eddy currents in the magnetic circuit. To reduce the magnetic losses, both
the generators rotor and stator core have a laminated structure from nanocrystalline foils. The
generator also serves as a startup motor.

8. Fabrication

The rotor and bearing geometries are the most critical components for production. Bearing
surfaces have to be produced and aligned with micrometer accuracy. Especially the bearing
surfaces on the rotor are critical as this rotor consists of 4 assembled components. Compressor
and turbine impellers have a complex 3D blade geometry due to their axial-radial design.
Unigraphics NX 3.0 CAD/CAM software is used for modelling and tool path generation.
The titanium (Ti-6Al-4V) compressor is produced by 5-axis milling on a Kern micromilling
machine, with tools down to 0.5 mm in diameter. The blank including the precise bearing and
mating surfaces is machined on a Hembrug lathe.
The ceramic turbine is produced by die-sinking electrical discharge machining (EDM). An
electrically conductive ceramic composite is chosen with good mechanical, thermal and
machining properties: Si3N4-TiN. The graphite EDM electrodes are machined by 3-axis
micromilling. The roughness after EDM is 2.3 m Ra, such that postprocessing by grinding or
abrasive flow machining is required. For future large series production ceramic powder injection
moulding is envisaged. The ceramic bearing surfaces on the turbines backside are finished with
diamond grinding tools to micrometer tolerances and 0.10 m Ra.

Fig. 5: Impeller prototypes. Left: ceramic turbine. Right: compressor. Both diameter 20 mm.

9. Testing
To test the performance of the most critical components without the overhead of the complete
system, a special set-up is built, containing only compressor, turbine, diffuser and bearings: a socalled turbo-shaft set-up.