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Review

Wood would burn


Jim Swithenbank a, Qun Chen a,*, Xiaohui Zhang a, Vida Sharifi a,
Mohamed Pourkashanian b
a
b

SUWIC, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Sheffield, Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 3JD, UK
School of Process, Environmental and Materials Engineering, Leeds University, Clarendon Road, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

article info

absract

Article history:

In view of the world-wide problem of energy sustainability and greenhouse gas production

Received 23 September 2009

(carbon dioxide), it is timely to review the issues involved in generating heat and power

Received in revised form

from all fuels and especially new (to the UK) solid fuels, including high moisture fuels such

16 December 2010

as wood, SRF, oil shale, tar sands and brown coal, which will become major international

Accepted 21 December 2010

fuels as oil and gas become depleted. The combustion properties of some of these materials

Available online 12 January 2011

are significantly different from traditional coal, oil and gas fuels, however the technology
proposed herein is also applicable to these conventional fuels.

Keywords:

This paper presents some innovative combustion system options and the associated

High pressure oxy-fuel combustion

technical factors that must be considered for their implementation. For clarity of under-

Carbon dioxide recovery and

standing, the novel concepts will be largely presented in terms of a currently developing

sequestration

solid fuel market; biomass wood chips.

Condensing boiler

One of the most important characteristics of many solid fuels to be used in the future

Wood combustion

(including oil shale and brown coal) is their high moisture content of up to 60%. This could

Power generation

be removed by utilising low grade waste heat that is widely available in industry to dry the

Low grade heat recovery

fuel and thus reduce transport costs. Burning such dried wood for power generation also
increases the energy available from combustion and thus acts as a thermal transformer by
upgrading the low grade heat to heat available at combustion temperatures.
The alternative approach presented here is to recover the latent heat by condensing the
extrinsic moisture and the water formed during combustion. For atmospheric combustion,
the temperature of the condensed combustion products is below the dew point at about
55e65  C and is only suitable for recovery in an efficient district heating system. However,
in order to generate power from the latent heat, the condensation temperature must be
increased to the level where the heat can be used in the thermodynamic power cycle. This
can be achieved by increasing the combustion pressure to above 80 bar, resulting in the
recovered latent heat being available at more than 200  C. It can then be used to increase
the cycle efficiency by about 15% by pre-heating the boiler water and/or combustion air etc.
A further advantage is that the high pressure of the combustion gases also reduces the
superheater tube stress since it can balance the steam pressure.
The key advantage of this high pressure flue gas is that it is above the pressure at which
carbon dioxide condenses to a liquid or supercritical gas at atmospheric temperature. Thus
when used with oxy-fuel combustion, the carbon dioxide flue gas from which the moisture
has been condensed can be cooled to atmospheric temperature and the supercritical CO2 can

* Corresponding author. Tel.: 44 (0) 114 222 7563; fax: 44 (0) 114 222 7501.
E-mail address: q.chen@sheffield.ac.uk (Q. Chen).
0961-9534/$ e see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.biombioe.2010.12.026

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be fed directly into the pipes leading to the sequestration site. An important consideration of
these strategies is to ensure that non-condensable gases in the exhaust, including oxygen
and nitrogen, do not adversely affect the condensation processes.
When oxy-fuel combustion is used, the flame temperature must be moderated by a cool
diluent. Recycled carbon dioxide is often proposed for this duty. However, since the latent
heat is recovered, the moisture or even additional water can fulfil this role. This latter
option may be advantageous since it is more efficient to pump wood chip fuel in water into
the high pressure zone rather than feed solid wood particles. Surplus water can be simply
drained and the wet wood chips are a good fuel when the latent heat of the moisture in the
fuel gases is recovered into the power cycle.
Bearing in mind that it is much more efficient to pump a liquid to high pressure than to
compress the same material as a gas, indicates that cryogenic oxygen is a suitable material
to use for an efficient power station that generates energy from biomass (or other fuels
such as coal etc).
Finally, combustion of the hydrogen from the wateregas reaction with oxygen allows the
steam temperature in the turbine to be increased to the gas-turbine engine range of
1000e1400  C and hence the biomass and/or fossil fuel cycle efficiency can be well over 60%!
2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1.

Introduction

Large quantities of wood are burned world-wide for cooking


and heating using combustion systems varying from three
stones to support a cauldron to large systems such as
a 400 MW fluidised bed boiler burning wood chips. Recent
plans include the construction of wood-fired boilers of
700 MWe output and the scale of equipment generating power
using wood biomass is clearly increasing.
In 2008, the global trade of wood chips was estimated to
have reached 29 million tones [1]. Although no wood-fired
energy plants in the UK are currently dependent on imported
biomass in the form of chips or wood pellets, power plants are
starting to ship wood from Brazil, Canada, Scandinavia and
South Korea to meet their growing demand for timber. Meanwhile, it is being planned to develop large wood-fired energy
plants that will use imported chips, pellets or both. If all these
planned wood-fired plants are built, the import quantity could
rapidly rise to about 27 million tonnes per annum [1].
It has been estimated that the UK annually generates
approximately 5 million tones of waste wood. In 2008, around
40% of the waste wood was recycled and reused [2]. The majority
of the recycled waste wood was used to produce chipboard and
fibreboard for building and furniture manufacture. Statistics

shows, however, this fraction was reduced by 5% in 2009


whereas the proportion for recycled wood used as biomass
energy increased by 33% [2].
It is timely to review the issues involved in generating
power from wood fuel since the properties of this material
are significantly different from traditional coal, oil and gas
fuels. The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the options
with an innovative open mind, rather than to carry out
a detailed comparative analysis of the many technical factors
that must be considered before actual plant construction.

2.

Wood fuel characteristics

Conventional fossil fuels consist almost exclusively of carbon,


hydrogen and inert ash. On the other hand, wood is largely
composed of cellulose, hemi-cellulose and lignin, materials
that include about 30% oxygen within their structure. As shown
in Table 1, the effect of this oxygen is to reduce the calorific
value of the wood to about one half that of conventional fossil
fuels. During combustion this oxygen is incorporated into the
water and carbon dioxide in the combustion product gases.
Furthermore, raw wood can contain more than 50% moisture; hence the combustion products generally contain a much

Table 1 e Properties of coal, wood and RDF samples [3,4].

Proximate analysis (%, dry)

Ultimate analysis (%, dry ash free )

HHV (MJ/kg)

Fixed Carbon
Volatiles
Ash
C
H
O
N
S

Coal

White Oak

Pine bark

RDF

55.8
33.9
10.3
84.2
5.6
5.5
1.3
3.5

17.2
81.3
1.5
50.2
5.5
43.8
0.4

33.9
54.7
0.4
56.5
5.6
37.9

9.8
67.6
18.9
61.2
8.2
26.6
1.3
0.2

31.75

19.42

21.78

22.30

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higher fraction of moisture than would be obtained from


conventional fuels.
The effect of the moisture on wood fuel can be very
dramatic. First of all, when raw wood fuel is transported,
whether by road, rail or sea, it is apparent that more than 50% of
the cargo is often water. This obviously has an impact on the
cost, fuel efficiency and emissions of transportation. Analysis
of the potential production of wood in the UK shows that it
would not be feasible to produce enough wood fuel to satisfy
our total power needs. The import of sustainable wood
supplies by sea from Africa or South America etc. will probably
be carried out in huge wood tankers whose fuel consumption
to deliver the load is a tiny fraction of the energy of the cargo [5].
The impact of the water on combustion is also dramatic.
This can be seen from its effect on the calorific value (CV) of
the fuel since every 10% increase in the moisture content
reduces the CV of the fuel by about 2 MJ/kg. Thus the lower CV
of the raw fuel is about 8 MJ/kg whereas that of dry wood fuel
is about 18 MJ/kg. It is not necessary to dry wood completely to
obtain an advantage, as can be seen from the following
argument. Simply reducing the moisture from 50% to 30%
would increase the CV from 8 MJ/kg to 12 MJ/kg. This represents a 50% increase in calorific value for a modest amount of
drying. Clearly, determination of the optimum level would
require a detailed economic analysis for any specific case.
Dry wood fuel is thus a value added product and drying
could provide an energy efficient means of using the huge
amount of low grade heat that is currently discharged to the
atmosphere by industry. Not only could this result in reducing
transport costs, but also it is thermodynamically remarkable
since although the low grade heat is unsuitable for generating
power, the drier wood regenerates the energy at flame
temperatures, when it can be used to generate power. Thus
drying can upgrade heat and this process can be regarded as
part of a thermal transformer.
The option of using solid recovered fuel (SRF) as an alternative to wood could be considered since it consists of more
than 50% biomass [6], and huge quantities are now becoming
available from material recycling facilities (MRF) in Europe. Its
morphology depends on the process used for production and
may vary from damp flock to rigid cylindrical pellets. Many of
the points discussed below are applicable to such fuels.
The recovery of the latent heat due to the high moisture
level in oil shale and brown coal is similarly important, as also
is the recovery of latent heat from the flue gas of natural gas
due to the large proportion of hydrogen in methane
(CH4 3O2 0 CO2 2H2O).

3.

Condensing boilers

The means of recovering energy from moisture in the flue gases


is to use a condensing boiler. These are used widely in the UK
on natural gas fired domestic water heating systems but they
are rarely used in industry. They recover the latent heat of the
moisture in addition to the sensible heat and hence exploit the
higher CV, thus increasing the efficiency of the boiler by about
15%. The condensation of moisture from the flue gases requires
that the gases be cooled below their dew point. In the case of
natural gas combustion products at atmospheric pressure, this

1001

temperature is about 55e65  C and it follows that the temperature of the water returned from a central heating system
(or from the hot water heating system), must be about 30  C, i.e.
well below this temperature. This requires an underfloor
heating system of a high surface area of the radiators in the
building. Similar considerations apply to district heating
schemes if the latent heat of the moisture is to be recovered
from the flue gases. Most district heating schemes in the UK
presently use delivery and return water temperatures of about
120  C and 70  C respectively, although some Scandinavian
district heating schemes do utilise the latent heat [7].
However, if wood is to be used for a combined heat and
power (CHP) or district heating scheme, then there will be
a significantly larger amount of latent heat that could be
recovered by condensing the flue gases.

4.

High pressure combustion systems

Bearing in mind the fact that energy in the form of electricity


is more highly valued than low grade heat, it is worth
considering whether recovery of the latent heat of the flue gas
moisture from wood firing is practicable in power generation systems. Thermodynamic considerations show that heat
available at less that 50  C is not significantly useful for power
generation, either within the steam cycle or for pre-heating
boiler water or combustion air.
However, if the combustion takes place at high pressure,
Fig. 1 shows that the dew point increases to more than 200  C
and the latent heat is then available to increase the efficiency
of the electrical power production by about 10%. A coal fired
system utilising such a system has been investigated analytically by CANMET [8].
For raw wood, oil shale and brown coal with 60% moisture
content burning with oxygen, the moisture content of the flue
gases is about 20e35%. The high pressure combustion system
is well matched to fuels with such high moisture content since
the latent heat is recovered at a useful temperature. Furthermore, the flow of moisture through the combustion system
serves to moderate the combustion temperature and thus
reduces the need for carbon dioxide flue gas recycle that is
required with coal fired oxy-fuel systems. It must also be noted
that the recycled gases are significantly reactive compared to
the nitrogen present with an air-fuel combustion system.
The high flue gas pressure also reduces the superheater
tube stress when it is matched to the steam pressure. If it
exceeds the steam pressure then the inversion of the superheater tube load from tension to compression could allow
novel materials such as silicon carbide/nitride to be used. The
thermal conductivity of these refractory materials is four times
higher than stainless steel and their temperature capability is
much higher. This potential extension to the proposed system
would allow steam temperatures to be increased resulting in
a substantial enhancement in power generation efficiency.

5.

Heat recovery by the condensation of water

As mentioned above, the condensation of water from the high


pressure flue gases recovers heat at more than 200  C. This is

1002

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250

Flue gas dew point (C)

200

150
35 % H2O
30% H2O
25% H2O
20% H2O
15% H2O
10% H2O
5% H2O

100

50

0
0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Pressure (bar)
Fig. 1 e Flue gas dew point temperature as a function of pressure and moisture content.

6.

Carbon dioxide recovery

this curve applies for pure gas and for a real system and account
must be taken of the actual composition of the mixture. This
issue is discussed in the literature [9] where it is shown that gas
impurities can have a profound effect of the phase equilibrium
of the carbon dioxide rich stream. One main conclusion from
this observation is that high quality oxygen (0.5% N2) should be
used for the combustion process. Also, products of incomplete
combustion such as CO and contaminants such as sulphur
compounds must be removed at an appropriate point.
The desire to operate with a high flue gas condensation
temperature and an output of supercritical liquid carbon
dioxide both require high pressure combustion at above 80 bar.
Detailed design studies are needed to optimise this pressure for
the fuel combustion; however, 100 bar can be regarded as an
approximate value at this stage of the discussion.

7.

Fuel feeding system

The technique used to feed a solid fuel into a high pressure


environment poses some interesting problems. If a lock hopper
system is used, then the chamber between the two valves will fill
with gas as the solids move into the high pressure environment.

80
60
50

Liquid CO2

Solid

40
30

Gas CO2

20
10

The main advantage of the pressurised combustion system is


that carbon dioxide can be recovered for transmission and
sequestration. For pure carbon dioxide, the pressure temperature relation for its liquefaction is shown in Fig. 2, where the
liquid region lies above the curve. Again, it must be noted that

Critical Point

70

Pressure (bar)

at a sufficiently high temperature that it can be used within


the power generation system and thus increase the plant
efficiency. The question of where it should be returned to the
power cycle has been considered in the case of coal firing [9].
Possible locations are: heating the oxygen used for combustion, or heating the boiler feed water. It was found that the
latter was more beneficial in the case of coal firing.
Although Fig. 1 shows the flue gas temperature as a function of pressure, this figure assumes that the gas consists of
pure carbon dioxide and water vapour. In practice, other
contaminants will be present. These are due to contaminants
in the oxygen, particularly nitrogen, and contaminants in the
fuel, thus leading to possible flue gas contaminants including
sulphur dioxide, HCl and oxides of nitrogen. The actual flue
gas condensation temperature must therefore take the effect
of these contaminants into account. Fortunately, flue gas
scrubbing technology is well developed and scrubbing should
precede the condensation. Also, as with domestic condensing
boilers, the heat transfer tubes in the condensation section
must be made of plastic fluorocarbon to avoid corrosion
problems. If required, very low levels of moisture in the
sequestered carbon dioxide can be achieved by polishing it
with silica gel. The water remaining in the sequestered carbon
dioxide is an important parameter from its potential contribution to pipe corrosion problems, especially if sulphur oxides
are present. However wood is relatively free from sulphur and
this problem will be less severe with biomass combustion.
If the carbon dioxide is to be marketed at low pressure, then
even if it is saturated with water at high pressure, expansion to
low pressure will cause its humidity to drop remarkably.

0
-100

Triple Point
-80

-60

-40

-20

20

Temperature ( C)
Fig. 2 e Phase diagram for pure carbon dioxide.

40

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The hopper full of gas will then release to the low pressure region
and must be discharged, or it must be pumped back up to the
high pressure level before being returned. This loss can be
minimised by using a displacement piston. Compressing solid
fuels to high pressure requires very little energy since they are
largely incompressible but the space between particles represents a problem. This problem is usually solved with coal fired
gasifiers by using slurry made from the fuel in water. For
a combustor operating at high pressure with latent heat
recovery, the energy required to evaporate the water added to
make wood fuel slurry will be largely recovered in the
condenser. The effect of the amount of water that must be added
the wood to make pumpable material and the size of the wood
particles will obviously have an effect on the combustion as
discussed below.
Slurries that contain particles can interfere with the operation of valves in the pump. A valveless system can be
designed whereby the particles are fed through the pressure
gradient produced in water spinning in a zero liquid flow
centrifugal turbine configuration. Such a system would allow
the particles to be transferred to the high pressure system
with a smaller proportion of water. Nevertheless, the
optimum proportion of moisture in the high pressure
combustor still remains to be determined.
The problem of feeding solid recovered fuel (SRF) as an alternative to wood depends on the physical nature of the material.
Flock can be fed as a water slurry as above, whilst the energy to
feed semi-solid SRF may be minimised by extruding a cylindrical
worm of material directly into the high pressure environment.

8.
High pressure combustion of solid fuel
(wood)
There are several potential combustor configurations that can
be considered for the high pressure combustion of wood. These

are listed in Table 2, together with their advantages and


disadvantages.
Bearing in mind the requirement for high pressure means
that the whole combustion equipment must be enclosed in
a pressure vessel, it is apparent that the chosen system should
be simple to maintain and operate. This suggests that
a moving grate or rotary kiln would be unsuitable. A shaft
combustor could be used for small scale but would not be
suitable for damp wood chips. Entrained wet sawdust would
also be generally undesirable.
A circulating fluidised bed is quite flexible but tends to be
subject to high erosion. The bubbling fluidised bed is regularly
used for slurries and for wood chips and at first sight would be
the preferred technology for the proposed application. The
temperature of the bed must be controlled by in-bed heat
loading, fuel-oxygen ratio, flue gas recycle and/or water. A
typical bed temperature would be in the range of 800e900  C.
The use of added water to limit the combustion temperature is interesting since it could partially or completely replace
the recycle of the carbon dioxide flue gas, but the total flow
through the heating section of the boiler would be similar. The
overall heat balance for the cycle is almost unchanged since
the heat required to evaporate the water would be recovered
in the condenser. However, the combustion chemistry would
be significantly changed as the flue gases would contain
a greater proportion of hydrogen. If the oxygen were reduced
below stoichiometric, the heat output would decrease, and
obviously the system would approach the role of a gasifier.
Heat transfer in the high pressure system differs significantly from that in conventional boilers since both radiation
and convection contributions will increase with pressure. The
radiation increases modestly due to the greater concentration
of the emitting species which are largely water and carbon
dioxide. Convection heat transfer increases more rapidly with
pressure than radiation and account must be taken of this in
the design of the heat transfer surfaces in the boiler. The

Table 2 e Potential combustor configurations for high pressure wood combustion [10,11].
Advantages
Bubbling fluidised
bed

No moving parts in the chamber;


High flexibility for moisture
content and fuel kind

Circulating fluidised
bed

No moving parts in the chamber;


High flexibility for moisture content
and kind of biomass fuel;
Homogeneous combustion
conditions in the furnace;
High specific heat transfer capacity
High NOx reduction by efficient air staging;
Good load control and fast alteration
of load possible
Low investment costs for small-scale plant;
Low operating cost;
Low dust load in the flue gas
No moving parts in the hot zone;
Relatively low investment and operating costs;
Most versatile and high fuel flexibility

Entrained pulverised
combustion
Moving grate

Rotary kiln

Disadvantages
High investment and operating costs;
Possible bed agglomeration for high alkali
biomass fuels;
High dust load in the flue gas
High investment and operating costs;
High alkali biomass fuels;
High dust load in the flue gas;
High sensitivity for ash slagging

Limited particle size;


Extra start-up burner is necessary
Usually no mixing of fuel;
High excess oxygen decreases efficiency;
Less homogeneous combustion conditions
Limited mixing of fuel in the chamber;
Fairly high particulate and hydrocarbon concentrations
in the flue gas at the kiln exit

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9.

30

Mass concentration (mg/m3)

result is that smaller heat transfer surface area will be


required in regions such as the superheater.
Bearing in mind the fact that the system could be designed
so that the steam and flue gas pressures are almost equal
means that there is little, or no, stress on the heat exchanger
elements. Furthermore, the high densities of the fluids results
in liquid like heat transfer coefficients. Thus a very compact
heat exchanger such as a plate design unit could be used. In
this case the volume of a 100 MW heat exchanger would be
about the size of a large office desk!

Oxygen production

The improvement of about 15% in the power yield from the


proposed high pressure combustion system comes at the
expense of high pressure oxygen input. Bear in mind the fact
that pumping gases to high pressure requires an enormous
power input, whilst pumping the same flow as an incompressible liquid requires very little power, implies that the
oxygen is required as a liquid. Technology for the cryogenic
production of oxygen is well established, and is appropriate
for this application. However, cryogenic air separation is an
energy-intensive process. The specific energy for producing O2
with purity of 95e99.5 vol% is about 300 kW h/tonne. If cryogenic production of oxygen can be achieved as a by-product of
process industries, the costs could be lower. The above
discussion shows that the quality of the oxygen is also
important to the process and the economic choice of oxygen
containing a few percent of nitrogen, or a fraction of one
percent of nitrogen will be a key factor in the optimisation of
a high pressure, wood fired, power generation system.

20
15
10
5
0
Wood firing plant (literature) Retrofitted Boiler (measured)

Fig. 3 e Mass concentration of particles from a wood boiler


and retrofitted coal boiler.

atmospheric equivalents, but the need to contain the very


high pressure will undoubtedly pose special problems. It is
also expected that the condensation of water stage in the
proposed system will be effective in removing sub-micron fly
ash particles.
It is particularly noteworthy that there will be little (or no)
atmospheric emissions from the plant and the power industry
will no longer require chimneys! Due to the high density of the
sequestered carbon dioxide, the exhaust pipe from a 500 MW
plant will be about 300 mm diameter.

11.
10.

25

Issues of scale

Emissions

With wood combustion, the amount of bottom ash is likely to


be small, and there is considerable experience in ash removal
when operating a fluidised bed system at atmospheric pressure. Reversing the feed system discussed above for fuel
implies that the ash should be removed from the high pressure zone suspended in water.
The main gaseous contaminants of the flue gases are likely
to be O2, N2 CO, NOx, SOx, HCl, fly ash, organics and other
minor species. The oxygen arises from the need to burn out
the fuel, whilst the nitrogen is the main impurity in the feed
oxygen. The emission of fine particulates from atmospheric
pressure wood combustion has given particular concern [12]
and data from the literature [13] together with data from our
measurements on a boiler converted from coal firing are
shown in Fig. 3. Other contaminants will be at the ppm level.
Flue gas emissions from the combustion of contaminated
wood and C&D (construction and demolition) wood are
currently regulated by Waste Incineration Directive (WID).
The WID is a European law aiming to control emissions from
the incineration and co-incineration of waste. However, it is
anticipated that most gas cleaning equipment such as scrubbers, activated charcoal and bag filters will be fitted in the high
pressure system as discussed below. Due to the high density
of the gases, these units will be significantly smaller than their

The proposed pressure in the plant is about half that in


a conventional high pressure gas cylinder and this clearly
leads to critical features of the plant design. It is likely that
parts of the equipment with a thermal load, such as the fluidised bed, will be placed within a separate pressure vessel. It
follows that the pressure vessel construction material must be
chosen for its strength rather than its thermal properties and
it will be lined with insulation.
The economics of most process plants follow the rule that
their cost increases at the 0.6 power of their scale whereas the
throughput increases linearly with scale. This leads to the well
known economy of scale, and the result is often a very large
power plant. However, high pressure systems require a large
amount of metal and many parts such as valves need an
amount of material that scales as the cube of a linear dimension, whilst the valve port area only increases as the square.
This property can result in the specific material cost per unit of
throughput increasing with scale. The overall result is likely to
be that there is an optimum size for the final power plant.
It should be noted, however, costs and market issues for
such power plants rely heavily on system safety, experience
with the technologies, as well as policy constrains. These are
well beyond the discussion scope of this paper. The detailed
economic characteristics of the system will be evaluated at
a later stage of the research programme.

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12.

1005

Ultra-high efficiency prospects

The potential to increase steam temperature and hence cycle


efficiency [14] by using new superheater materials that exploit
the inverted pressure load on the heat transfer tubes was
presented above. Nevertheless, the temperatures are then still
well below the established technology temperatures used
with cooled turbine blades on aircraft gas turbines. This gives
us scope to dramatically increase the efficiency as follows:
The intrinsic and extrinsic water present in the combustion chamber will lead to the production of substantial
quantities of hydrogen, principally through the wateregas
reaction. A number of studies are currently investigating the
separation of this H2 fuel from the carbon dioxide by various
types of membranes that operate at high temperatures.
For several years, we have been producing ultra-superheated steam at temperatures of 1500  Ce2000  C by burning
hydrogen rich fuel in a steam-oxygen mixture. Thus, utilising
this established technique to burn the hydrogen with some
oxygen allows the steam temperature in the turbine to be
increased to the established gas-turbine engine range of
1000e1400  C (Figs. 4 and 5) and hence the biomass and/or coal
cycle efficiency for electrical power generation can be
increased to well over 60%! The fact that cold nitrogen and/or
oxygen from the cryogenic air separator is used to cool the
condenser following the steam turbine also contributes to this
high efficiency.
Nevertheless, a staged development of the power cycle is
envisaged. Phase 1 would be the lower performance system
shown in Fig. 6. Here the fluid bed is operated slightly substoichiometrically to yield a gas containing a little CO and
hydrogen. The fluid bed is followed by gas cleaning with
a cyclone/ceramic filter to remove dust from the fluidised bed.
The CO, H2 and H/C gases are then burned to raise the
temperature and destroy any heavy hydrocarbons in the form
of vapourised tar before the first heat exchanger. The main
attraction of this Phase 1 design, which recovers latent heat, is
that it delivers CO2 sequestration without incurring the huge
energy penalties for atmospheric combustion associated with
high CO2 compression and amine scrubber fluid recovery.
These penalties typically amount to about 30% power loss.

Fig. 4 e An experimental high pressure, high temperature


(up to 1400  C) SiC tube heat exchanger.

Fig. 5 e Experimental high temperature steam concept.

Details of the Phase 1 process would take into account the


actual fuel being used. To develop the heat exchanger and
turbine, natural gas would be an appropriate clean fuel. In this
case the Rankine cycle top/bottom temperature difference
could exceed that of a combined (GTCC) cycle with the
advantage that the energy input from the fuel corresponds to
its higher heating value, and high pressure CO2 ready for
sequestration is produced. The trade-off between oxygen use
and atmospheric CO2 removal is expected to lie in favour of the
former. Changing the fuel to biomass, brown coal or oil shale
reveals the large advantage of the high pressure combustion
system since there then a large benefit from the latent heat
recovery that allows the higher heating value of the (intrinsic
and extrinsic moisture containing) fuel to be exploited.
In order to achieve ultra high efficiency, the Phase 3 scheme
shown in Fig. 7 is required. This scheme achieves very high efficiency by using a higher turbine entry temperature, and obviously requires the adaptation of cooled blade technology, already
used in gas turbines, to the steam turbine. Again, the details of the
actual plant will vary depending on the fuel to be used.
For example, wood fuels have low ash, low sulphur and low
chlorine, but generally have high alkali content. The alkali can
give corrosion problems with conventional superheater tube
materials. To mitigate this problem, the first step is to remove
the solid fly ash immediately after the fluidised bed, before the
temperatures are raised above the ash fusion point. The
second step is to take account of the low mechanical stress on
the superheater heat transfer material and use corrosion
resistant refractory materials such as silicon carbide and
coatings.
Many other fuels contain sulphur and/or chlorine. There is
considerable experience with these pollutants and the location
of their removal in a phase 3 system depends on the scrubbing
technology used. Most existing scrubbers use reagents containing calcium carbonate, lime or sodium bicarbonate, often
incorporating activated carbon to remove hydrocarbons and
heavy metals. An interesting new technique employs liquid tin
as the reagent [15]. This system operates at temperatures
above 250  C and removes sulphur as tin sulphide dissolved in
the tin. The sulphur is then removed from the tin by reaction
with zinc to precipitate zinc sulphide.

1006

b i o m a s s a n d b i o e n e r g y 3 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 9 9 9 e1 0 0 7

Fig. 6 e Phase 1 stage of development of the Hi-h power generation system.

Fig. 7 e Phase 3, final stage of the Hi-h power generation system with CO2 sequestration for fuels varying from coal, oil, gas,
biomass and SRF, to the oil shale and brown coal fuels that will be used increasingly as gas and oil are depleted.

b i o m a s s a n d b i o e n e r g y 3 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 9 9 9 e1 0 0 7

13.

Conclusions
[2]

 Decarbonise the atmosphere with advanced biomass and


fossil fuel burning technology.
 There is a high level of intrinsic and extrinsic moisture in
biomass, SRF, shale oil and brown coal combustion products.
Either dry the fuels using low grade heat to recover the extrinsic
moisture energy, or condense the moisture in a high pressure
combustion system to recover the latent heat of water in the
flue gas and hence exploit the higher calorific value of the fuel.
 Burning and condensing at high pressure not only recovers
the latent heat at >200  C for energy generation but also
allows condensation of CO2 for direct delivery of supercritical CO2 to the sequestration site.
 Pump liquids or fuels in water (e.g. wood chips as slurry) to
compress efficiently to high pressure, and then drain excess
water to deliver a damp fuel.
 Inverted heat transfer tube stress (compression) or balanced
steam/flue gas pressures allows use advanced materials and
heat exchanger designs.
 Oxy-fuel Combustion: Control flame temperature with water
to form H2 by the wateregas reaction or utilise recycled CO2.
 Pump cryogenic oxygen as liquid to high pressure.
 Use cold nitrogen and/or oxygen from the air separation
unit to cool the steam condenser to w2  C to maximise cycle
temperature difference and thus increase efficiency.
 Raise power generation efficiency for fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas,
brown coal, oil shale) and SRF/biomass to >60% by oxyhydrogen superheating steam to w1400  C at the turbine entry.

references

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