Currently, industrial countries generate most of their electricity in large centralized plants. These plants have excellent economies of scale, however, they usually transmit electricity through long distances and can affect the environment. Distributed generation is another approach that reduces the amount of lost energy during transmission as the electricity is generated closely to where it is used, this way reducing the size and number of power lines to be constructed.The current technologies in DG include small gas turbine engines, internal combustion reciprocating engines, photovoltaic panels, fuel cells, solar thermal conversion and Stirling engines using fossil fuels and bio-fuels. Among them, small gas turbine engines are a promising technology for the implementation of distributed generation systems in the near future. This work presents the results of the preliminary compressor design of a simple cycle gas turbine engine, obtained with the use of a straightforward one-dimensional FORTRAN code, which enables to calculate the main characteristics of a centrifugal compressor by means of the application of non-dimensional parameters, with a vast reduction of computational time. The results obtained were compared with a CFD analysis and with experimental results taken from specialized literature; therefore a reasonable agreement was reached.The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that by the use of a simple code it is feasible to obtain fairly close results in comparison with those which can be obtained by laborious iterative processes such as those developed through the analysis using CFD techniques.
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