Starter Generator Design Development for Modern Micro Gas Turbine Plant

Currently, gas turbine plants are actively developing as sources of autonomous power supply. This trend can be explained by one of the advantages of these devices. They have high specific mass-energy indicators due to the high speed. Micro-gas turbine installations account for more than a quarter of the generated capacity of all gas turbine units. The most promising design scheme of the electric part is the gearless coupling of the electric generator with the turbine. Generators with high speed have special requirements in terms of mechanical strength of rotating parts and reliability of the bearing assembly. The closest analogue to the proposed variant is a synchronous generator with radially arranged permanent magnets. The global monopoly of gas turbine plants with generators of this type is Capstone. But this design contains a number of insoluble technical contradictions that do not allow developing in this direction. Such contradictions include low electrical efficiency due to high magnetic losses, the complexity of cooling, the inability to increase power due to the axial length with the limitation of the rotor diameter due to the large magnitude of centrifugal forces. The article considers an alternative option. This is the design of a synchronous generator with axial permanent magnets applied to a highly efficient gas turbine power plant. The design of the generator and the principle of its operation are described. A computer simulation of the experimental model in the software packages Ansys Maxwell and Ansys Thermal was carried out.