Summary of Gas Turbine Cycles

Air Intake

• The first task of a gas turbine engine is to take in as much air as possible. The compressor accomplishes this task. The compressor at the inlet of a gas turbine engine is like an enormous vacuum cleaner and it sucks in as much air as possible during operation of the gas turbine engine. However, air intake is not the compressor's only job. The compressor performs two of the four tasks of a gas turbine engine during operation.

Compression

• After the compressor sucks as much air as possible into the engine, its high speed rotating compressor blades work to pressurize it. Air compression is the compressor's second task in gas turbine engine operation. Not only is the air pressurized during this process, it is super-heated, too. The compressor is run by energy from the turbine blades that are found aft of the gas turbine engine's combustion chamber.

Combustion

• The highly pressurized air from the compressor is then introduced into a combustion chamber where it is mixed with gas and ignited. This highly volatile mixture of gas and air continuously combusts during the gas turbine operation. This creates an enormous amount of expanded, super-heated, high-speed gas flow. This expanded gas flow contains enough energy to run the engine's compressor and provide external work energy.

Exhaust

• The hot, pressurized gas created by the internal combustion process is channeled out of the engine through a set of turbine blades at high speed. The turbine blades absorb heat energy from the exhaust gas, creating the force to keep the engine compressor rotating. The remaining heat energy, which is now at lower temperature and pressure than before passing through the turbine blades, exits with the exhaust gas. This remaining energy is used to do useful work such as running a power plant or propelling an aircraft forward.