Hydrogen Co-Firing in Siemens Low NOx Industrial Gas Turbines
(Room Rheinsaal 4)
29 Jun 17
2:00 PM
-
3:30 PM
Tracks:
Track E - Gas Fired Generation
Hydrogen is a CO2 free fuel that has the potential to become a future energy carrier simply by feeding it into the existing natural gas grid. Hydrogen is also present in waste gases from refineries, process gases from chemical industry or syngas from gasification of coal or biomass. Gas turbines offer a highly efficient energy conversion of gaseous fuel to electric power or mechanical drive. Introducing hydrogen in the fuel to a gas turbine with premixed low NOx systems, such as Siemens industrial gas turbines SGT-600 (25 MW), SGT-700 (33 MW) and SGT-800 (53 MW), could potentially induce flashback. The biggest technical challenge with hydrogen compared to natural gas is its high flame speed. Today Siemens offer the standard burner for fuels up to 15 % by volume of H2. Siemens has in continued development efforts enabled operation on higher hydrogen contents with a slightly modified burner. This paper reports the latest achievements of Siemens ongoing development to allow for hydrogen contents in natural gas higher than 40 vol-% in the 3rd generation DLE combustion system. Additive manufacturing, 3D printing, is used for rapid prototyping of burner hardware. A test from 2014 with hydrogen feed to one burner in a gas turbine is reported. Combustion monitoring techniques and measurements to check flame behavior and assess flashback potential of the tested fuel compositions are described. The test proved the capability of the concept burner to operate with at least 45 % by volume hydrogen in natural gas. It was also concluded that the NOx emissions could be kept below 24 ppm@15%O2 at 70-100% gas turbine load with the hydrogen rich fuel. Normal operation including transients and load cycling was also demonstrated with the hydrogen rich fuel. The burner design also showed to be suitable for long term operation with high hydrogen fuels since material temperatures was acceptable or sometimes even lower than for the standard burner.