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Gas turbine technology has traditionally been used by the aviation industry for powering the aircraft including acting as APU. Operational unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has a gas turbine which is used as Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which generically have overall efficiency not exceeding 35% which limits the range in terms of time in the air for the same APU fuel carried onboard. Gas turbine exhaust heat energy is largely wasted and there is scope of its utilization by thermally coupling it with a solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC). By coupling SOFC with the gas turbine (GT) based power system, a hybrid SOFC-GT based APU system has been proposed for thermodynamic analysis, and the thermal efficiency of the proposed system can be enhanced by 77%. This paper focuses on a thermodynamic cycle analysis of an internal reformed solid oxide fuel cell which is integrated with the gas turbine to form a hybrid APU system for an UAV.

During the past decade environmental and sustainability issues have become major problems to overcome since they have caused regional and global consequences. This paper discusses the environmental and sustainability aspects of Gas Turbine (GT) based aviation Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) analyzed with the aid of exergy. Exergy analysis is a potential tool to determine exergy destructions and losses and their true magnitudes and exact locations. In this study some exergy based parameters such as: exergetic efficiency, waste exergy ratio, exergy recoverability ratio, exergy destruction ratio, environmental impact factor, and exergetic sustainability index are proposed and investigated. Cycle operating parameters such as compressor-pressure-ratio (rp,c), Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) have been chosen for analysis of the gas turbine cycle based APU. Mathematical modeling of the cycle has been done and the same has been coded in MATLAB.

This paper deals with the exergo-environmental analysis of gas turbine with possible application as aviation auxiliary-power-unit (APU). The present work reports a comparison of thermodynamic performance, NOx and CO emission for basic gas turbine cycle (BGT) and intercooled-recuperated gas turbine (IcRcGT) cycle based engines for possible use by the aviation industry as auxiliary power unit (APU). In addition to this environmental sustainability index of these two cycles is also presented. Various cycle operating parameters such as compressor-pressure-ratio (rp,c), combustor-primary-zone-temperature, equivalence-ratio, and residence time have been chosen for analysis of the cycles. Mathematical modeling of the cycles has been done and the same have been coded in MATLAB. Results show that IcRcGT cycle exhibits higher gas turbine power output and gas turbine efficiency in comparison to BGT cycle for the same rp,c and turbine inlet temperature (TIT).