ARTICLE:

• APPLICATION OF PHYSICAL AND OPTICAL METHODS FOR SOOT EVALUATION IN A FULL-SCALE POWER PLANT  download article

Loretta Bonfanti
ENEL Produzione-Ricerca, Pisa, Italy

Leonardo Castellano
MATEC, Milano, Italy

Sauro Pasini
ENEL Ricerca - Generation Area Combustion and Fuel Gas Treatment Unit, Via Andrea Pisano, 120 I-56122 Pisa, Italy

Nice Pintus
ENEL SpA, Generation and Energy Management Division, A.T. Ricerca Via Andrea Pisano 120, 56122 Pisa, Italy

Christine Mounaim-Rousselle
L.C.S.R. CNRS, Orleans, France

ABSTRACT

Over the last few years, increasing attention has been paid to the problem of reducing pollutant emissions from the combustion processes of fossil fuels. To meet the requirements concerning NOx emissions, techniques based on a fuel/air staging were utilized. It is not difficult to imagine that the effectiveness of these techniques is very dependent on boiler configuration (boiler type, excess oxygen level, burner zone heat release rate, rate of fuel air mixing, atomization quality and others) and, at the same time, these new combustion configurations can have an impact on the thermal performance of the boiler itself.
Strong efforts have been dedicated to improve the knowledge on the methods for clean combustion, but many topics in the description of the physical behaviour of a full-scale plant have not yet had a satisfactory solution. The present paper deals with one of the most important problems encountered in evaluating the performance of advanced low-pollutant combustion systems: the measurement of the concentration of combustion products that exist in form of solid particles (soot) in the combustion chamber. Experimental tests were conducted on an oil-fired 150 MWe power station (Livorno unit#l). The basic idea of the study was to develop and verify the compatibility of different techniques for measuring the extinction coefficient and volume fraction of soot in furnace. The main conclusion is that a rough theoretical analysis of the data collected by two optical methods and the information given by the application of a Lidar apparatus provide almost similar values. More detailed information available from chemical analysis, which is not yet completed, could prove to be crucial to corroborate or disprove this statement.

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