Combustion, Fuels and Emissions for Industrial Gas Turbines
It is important that gas turbines used in Oil & Gas applications can burn a wide variety of fuels with the minimum impact on the environment or economics. Many types of gaseous and liquid fuels that can be used in Gas Turbines are discussed, as will be the two basic types of combustion system employed – ‘conventional’ and ‘Dry Low Emissions’ – along with the flexibility of these systems to accept different types of fuel. Some of the common contaminants found in fuels are discussed along with the impact these have on the operability and maintenance of industrial and aero-derivative gas turbines. Topics include: Types of gas turbines Types of exhaust emissions regulated Conventional combustion systems Dry Low (Pre-mixed) emissions combustion systems Fuel quality requirements ‘Pipeline’ quality Natural Gas fuels Premium liquid fuels (diesel, kerosene) Wellhead Gases as a Gas Turbine Fuel Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) Biogas fuels Refinery and process off gases Syngas Natural Gas Liquids and LPG fuels Crude Oil Operational impact of contaminants Water in fuel Storing fuels correctly
THE NATURE OF NOX FORMATION WITHIN AN INDUSTRIAL GAS TURBINE DRY LOW EMISSION COMBUSTOR
The NOx formation within a practical lean premixed gas turbine combustor concept has been investigated. The effects of chemical kinetics and fuel/air mixing have been isolated, by adopting an approach, which combines high pressure combustion testing, CFD and chemical reactor modelling. Given the complexities of the underlying fluid dynamic and chemical processes and their interactions, consistency has been sought between experimental and numerical approaches, prior to drawing any conclusions. Two variants of Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery’s dry low emissions combustor have been investigated, one exhibiting near-ideally premixed combustion over a wide range of combustor pressure drop. Perfectly Stirred Reactor analysis, utilising the GRI 3.0 NOx mechanism, shows that NOx formation is dominated by the N2O and Zeldovich routes, with the N2O route being the larger at flame temperatures below 1800-1900K, for systems operating at 14bars, 400°C inlet temperature and at residence times of interest. Other reactions involving H-N-O chemistry are also significant, however the CH-N-O chemistry has a negligible impact.
Robust solutions of inverse problems in electromagnetic non-destructive evaluation
Non-destructive testing (NDT) is the application of physical measurement technology based on energy interaction with the material and its nonconformities. The material's response is sensed by transducers and sensors which?in most cases?scan the component and document the results in inspection images. However, NDT measures a physically defined quantity or even an intrinsic property. The difference between non-destructive evaluation (NDE) and NDT is in the interpretation of the inspection data. NDE has to discuss the inspection results in terms of quality elements and characteristics which are relevant to describe the fitness of the material for use. In the case of macroscopic defects these are the kind of defect (cracklike, globular) and its size and orientation to the main stress directions; in the case of material property determination the parameters are mainly mechanical properties. Therefore, in NDE one has to solve inverse problems. The solution of inverse problems based on mathematical procedures such as integral equations is a strong developing discipline and most of the articles prepared for this special issue of the journal have the objective of discussing the latest state of the art in that field. However, practical NDE needs robust and quick solutions which are to be applied mainly online. Therefore, we present here inversion procedures based on multiple linear regression algorithms applied to inspection data. We describe the calibration procedure to fit the free parameters of the model functions and give examples of practical applications in industry.