Abstract: A method and apparatus are disclosed for preventing overspeed of a hot gas expander and its resultant load when the load (or a portion of it) is shed suddenly. In this situation, power applied by the expander to the shaft must be reduced, but normal feedback to the speed controller may be too slow to be effective. The load rejection may be sensed by a feedforward system before a significant speed increase is detected by the speed control loop. For this approach, the expander can be instrumented with either a flow measurement device, a downstream pressure, or a downstream temperature. Inlet pressure and inlet temperature are required. The method uses the characteristic map describing the expander (shaft power versus mass flow rate) along with a feedforward control action to anticipate the speed increase. By using dimensional analysis, the characteristic curves will collapse into single curves describing the parameters of reduced flow, reduced power, and pressure ratio.

Abstract: A method and apparatus are disclosed for controlling the rotational speed of gas and steam turbines, and hot gas expanders, with each of these drivers driving a rotational load by way of a shaft. To accomplish this control technique, it is necessary to easily and accurately calculate the amount of power which must be shed by the driver(s) to maintain a constant speed, i.e., neither accelerating nor decelerating. Action must be taken to reduce the power applied to the shaft by this amount. The method incorporates an open-loop approach and uses a time derivative to moderate the open-loop action accordingly.