PGE/REWE 2015

Low NOx Burner Development for an Evolving Fuel Diet (Room G109, Auditorium Centre, First Floor)

09 Jun 15
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Tracks: Theme: Coal's Cleaner Future, Theme: Renewable Energy Strategy, Business & Integration

Speaker(s): David Sturgeon, Senior Engineer, Doosan Babcock; Douglas Spalding, Head of Product Planning and Marketing, Doosan Babcock

Utility power plant operators are reacting to current power supply market conditions and increasingly stringent environmental legislation by two main routes. Some are reducing operating costs through utilisation of cheaper, lower grade coals, while others are taking advantage of government subsidies to fire biomass fuels. In both cases, the fuel switches introduce significant challenges to fuel handling and firing systems compared with the original design fuels - the combustion systems must continue to achieve high combustion efficiency and low NOx performance. Doosan Babcock has recently retrofitted thirty 80 MWt burners to a 760MWe supercritical boiler in the USA to accommodate the firing of a high swelling Eastern US bituminous coal. The burner design represents an advancement of the Doosan Babcock low NOx axial swirl burner technology Doosan Babcock has also completed a number of biomass firing retrofit projects world-wide that have included the installation of biomass-specific burners. The paper will give an overview of the development of the two burner types and present results from recently-completed plant commissioning tests.