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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed tougher nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions limits for new, modified, and reconstructed stationary combustion turbines. The proposed rule identifies a combination of combustion controls […]
The post EPA Proposes Tighter NOx Limits for Combustion Turbines appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has denied an industry petition seeking to delist stationary combustion turbines from the agency’s list of hazardous air pollutants (HAP) major source categories regulated […]
The post EPA Denies Industry Petition to Delist Stationary Combustion Turbines as Hazardous Pollutants appeared first on POWER Magazine.
The post Rediscovering Fire: Advancements in Gas Turbine Combustion appeared first on POWER Magazine.
Gas power market drivers and a quest for relevance in future decarbonized systems are driving fundamental shifts in gas turbine combustion design approaches.
Combustion lies at the heart of gas turbine technology. It provides the core function of adding heat, through a controlled burn of large amounts of fuel and air, to a gas turbine’s conversion of chemical energy into mechanical energy and, for power generating turbines, electrical energy. In concept, a combustor essentially comprises a fuel injector and a wall to contain the flame. But far from simplistic, the process must achieve a delicate balance of equivalence ratio between the fuel and available oxygen; flame stability; and operational stability to support acceleration and operation of the gas turbine over the entire load of the machine.
Developers have attempted to refine this complex dance for decades, as John Gülen, a fellow at Bechtel Infrastructure & Power Corp. and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the author of several books profiling the evolution and status of gas turbine technology, told POWER.…
San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) said on Aug. 12 it will get $ 3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and another $ 760,658 from an assortment of industry giants to design a large-scale flameless pressurized oxy-fuel combustion pilot plant.
The announcement is a major boost for the promising, but yet unproven technology, that industry observers herald as a groundbreaking new approach to utility-scale power generation. As SwRI explained, “the process uses air that is stripped of other elements like argon and nitrogen until it is pure oxygen. It is then combined with a fuel, usually either coal or natural gas, into a stream of carbon dioxide (CO2) and water inside a combustor. The fuel and oxygen chemically react, and the hot gas can be used to boil steam, which pushes a turbine that generates power.”
Among the benefits of pressurized oxy-fuel combustion is that it has the potential to substantially improve overall cycle efficiency. Because it uses oxygen-rich combustion, it could also generate pure CO2 that can be easily captured and stored, or reused.…