Session: 04-01: Fuel flex

Paper Number: 83039

83039 - Experimental Study on Combustion of Methane / Ammonia Blends for Gas Turbine Application 

Hydrogen produced from renewables (green H₂) or from reformed natural gas with CCS (blue H₂) can be used as fuel to achieve CO₂ free power production from gas turbines. Because of the challenges related to transport and storage of H₂, NH₃ has been proposed as a hydrogen carrier as it can be stored in liquid form at moderate pressures and temperatures, thus increasing the energy density considerably. NH₃ can be used as a fuel directly, but the low reactivity and flame speed in air makes combustion stability challenging in conventional gas turbine combustors. As no solutions are commercially available today, a transitional approach is to only replace part of the fuel with NH₃ to limit the change in the combustion properties, although this only partly decarbonizes the fuel. The presented experimental study investigates combustion of CH₄/NH₃ blends with air in the scaled 4^th generation DLE burner of SGT-750 at pressures up to 6 bar and thermal power up to 100 kW. The effect of equivalence ratio and NH₃/CH₄ mixture ratio on the emissions of NOx, CO, CH₄ and NH₃ is studied at different pressures and power. The main findings are that even small amounts of NH₃ in the fuel results in unacceptable high NOx emissions at fuel lean conditions. Increased pressure reduced the NOx formation while increased adiabatic flame temperature led to higher NOx emissions. However, this work shows that NOx emissions in the range of 200 ppm@15vol% O₂ can be achieved with a staged combustion strategy where primary zone is kept fuel rich, even for fuel NH₃ content up to 100%.

Presenting Author: Mario Ditaranto SINTEF Energy Research

Presenting Author Biography: Researcher at SINTEF Energy Research

Authors:

Inge Saanum SINTEF Energy Research
Mario Ditaranto SINTEF Energy Research
Jenny Larfeldt Siemens Energy AB