Combined cycle plant

A Carnot heat engine, which operates on the Carnot cycle, the theoretical ideal thermodynamic cycle that provides an upper limit on the efficiency that any classical thermodynamic engine.

A combined cycle power plant is an assembly of heat engines that work in tandem from the same source of heat, converting it into mechanical energy. Combining two or more thermodynamic cycles improves overall efficiency, which reduces fuel costs. The principle is that after completing its cycle in the first engine, the working fluid (the exhaust) is still hot enough that a second subsequent heat engine can extract energy from the heat in the exhaust. Usually the heat passes through a heat exchanger so that the two engines can use different working fluids.

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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article cycle power plant Combined cycle power plant, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).