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Gas Power Technology QUARTERLY 3rd QUARTER 2015 Testing combustion in-house at Siemens’ Berlin facility Having spent $100 million to build a new test centre just outside Berlin, Siemens engineers are now further optimising the combustion process of gas turbines and check how they can best handle various fuel types. “We don’t sell green bananas to the customer. We thoroughly test every innovation and the Berlin facility is tailor-made for combustion testing,” said Jerry Klopf, director at the Clean Energy Center near Berlin, part of Siemens’ Gas Turbines, Engineering. he overwhelming majority, or 95%, of customers ask for dual-fuel flexibility and refineries at times even want triple fuel flexibility, he told Gas Power Tech Quarterly during a visit to the test centre. T“Off-design testing helps us to find out the limits of a new or up- graded engine, through variation of control parameters. Then, on-site testing is undertaken and we’re on our way to beat the record efficiency in Irsching with our new installation in Lausward,” he anticipated. ‘Trick in combustion’ helps Lausward reach new record efficiency Asked how Siemens is managing to beat its own record efficiency levels, Mr Klopf suggested this was achieved “thanks to a little trick in combustion: the ratio between oxygen and fuel has been optimised, longer operation times of their assets, reduce maintenance intervals by exposing finer drops of fuel to oxygen, we can now increase the and avoid costly downtime. efficiency.” “All threads of communication from our global testing are coming to- Apart from combustion system rig testing, the Berlin test centre gether in Berlin, so we are having lively discussions and video confer- also carries out material testing (e.g. ceramic head shield) and rig test- ences with research colleagues all over the word,” he said. Real-time ing for compressors and turbines. The worldwide customer base of the data visualisation of TTF testing data helps to gather insight from the German OEM can now test engines under real conditions to ensure company’s worldwide engineering locations. continued on page 2 Dense vapour research helps boost power Steam Turbine output 8% Hot Thermal Oil Researchers at the University of Delft in the Generator Netherlands have developed new understandings of Steam engine operation through a multi-faceted approach Generator ORC Turbine that is now delivering benefits in more efficient design for gas power generation and small scale Cold Thermal power systems. Oil Generator e have achieved success in a number of areas but most notably in our understanding of gas dynamics and our development of integral sys- ORC “Wtem design,’ Piero Colonna, Professor of Propul- Evaporator sion and Power in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the university told Gas Power Tech Quarterly. Air Cooled Condenser The team has focused much of its research efforts to date on the study of ORC engines. These systems employ working fluids with a Vapour research has helped improve the operation of ORC engines high molecular mass that allow for the design of efficient systems for power generation from low-to-medium grade heat (100 to 500 °C). of sources such as biomass combustion, industrial waste heat, geother- ORC power systems are arguably the best option for the conversion mal heat or concentrated solar radiation. continued on page 2 2 TURBINE TECHNOLOGY GPT Journal 3rd Quarter 2015 Top story, continued from page 1 In February 2015, the test centre opened in AGENDA Ludwigsfelde – less than an hour’s drive from Siemens’ gas turbine manufacturing plant in the centre of Berlin, and Mr Klopf said when showing visitors around with an air of pride: “We built three test cells in parallel at a cost of FLEXIBLE OPERATIONS approximately €100 million, we are currently Turbine research improves operational flexibility 3 25 employees and there’s more than enough Compressed-air system delivers peak power within minutes 4 space for further expansion.” POWER-TO-GAS First US power-to-gas project uses Proton OnSite electrolyser 5 Protecting intellectual property Motivation and key driver for this substantial SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS investment was the need to keep sensitive Siemens launches SPPA-T3000 Cue to enhance plant control 7 knowledge in-house. “We decided to build our Intelligent software boosts cyber-security for power plants 8 own test facility to keep intellectual property Convion SOFC system delivers co-gen capabilities to operators within Siemens. We test combustion systems, 10 burners, flows – these are key components CHP & DISTRIBUTED POWER which determine efficiency, output and emis- Scuderi engine cuts costs with combined operational modes 11 sions of a gas turbine.” Dutch tomato farmers pilot GE CHP diagnostics 12 At the test centre compressors can beef up the pressure up to 50 bar. “We are faster in the REPAIR & MAINTENANCE development cycle through rapid engineering Pressure wave technology cleans HRSGs with a bang 15 and prototyping through concentrated research, manufacture and development capabilities. POWER STORAGE “Close distance to gas turbine plant Berlin Hydrogen gas conversion for energy storage hits 85% per MW 17 certainly help, as does our ‘1,000 eye principle’ with virtual collaboration with gas turbine experts worldwide,” he said, stressing that “just two hours after test, all the results are documented.” continued from page 1 “We have focused on the dense vapour “We are now starting to conduct research to regime, where the turbine is operating, close to couple our understanding of dense vapour Gas Power Technology critical point of the fluid and through this have regimes with material simulations in order to Journal developed a deeper understanding of the high better model turbine lifetimes and identify po- Publisher temperature, highly supersonic processes,” tential improvements in the design,” Colonna Stuart Fryer Colonna explained. said, adding that in some situations “power Editor “This deeper understanding has allowed us output for an entire system can be improved by Anja Karl to developed an approach we term Automated as much as 5% – 8%.” Tel: +44 (0)207 017 3417 Blade Shape Optimisation which allows us to [email protected] improve the design of turbines and collaborate Integral System Design Senior Reporter closely with manufacturers to improve output.” Another key aspect of the team’s work has Malcolm Ramsay Tel: +44 (0) 207 017 3413 been the creation of software under the Integral [email protected] Elongated nozzle design boosts System Design framework. This set of tools al- Asia Correspondent output by 8% lows designers to optimise the parameters Ramadas Rao To date, the team has been particularly success- when designing an ORC engine based on a vast Tel: +91 80 4219 0096 ful in this respect with significant improve- number of parameters. [email protected] ments in power output due to remodelling of “We have developed the Integral System Advertising key components in the turbine design. Design software with the aim being to create a Monika Wojcik Tel: +44 (0)207 017 3442 “One key outcome of our research has been framework to optimise overall operation by [email protected] the discovery that in many scenarios nozzles taking into account the interaction of the vari- Events need function better when they are consider- ous components,” Colonna added. Barbara Canals ably longer. This comes about due to the com- It is expected that this will help create a Tel: +44 (0)207 173 410 plex interplay of density variation and speed of new generation of engines that are commer- [email protected] sound variations along the length of the nozzle cially competitive at a wider range of scales. Subscriptions and has significant implications for efficiency,” “A recent study for Shell on the role ORC Nikolett Kecskemeti Tel: +44 (0)207 253 3402 Colonna said. and heat recovery has shown that ORC can be [email protected] Alongside work to refine specific compo- attractive in a number of scenarios. In general Production nents the team’s research has also focused on it is most favourable in greenfield sites, even Vivian Chee holistic system approaches to identify issues more is there is water available for cooling and Tel: +44 (0) 208 995 5540 around operation stability and reliability of sys- the heat source is located very close. [email protected] tems overall. “As well as funding from research funding continued on page 3 3rd Quarter 2015 GPT Journal FLEXIBLE TURBINE OPERATIONS 3 Turbine research improves operational flexibility Improvements in improving the turndown, operational flexibility, and fuel flexibility of combustion turbines may soon be possible thanks to new research at the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the largest U.S. university research facility working on gas turbine problems. ur research focuses on the multi-facted approach the team takes to un- positions of the velocity fields to determine the R&D of technology that derstanding combustor dynamics. effects of transverse acoustic forcing. minimizes emissions and By tying together the data from a variety of “As expected, there are differences between “Omaximizes combustor measurements the team is able to compare the single and triple-nozzle flow fields, but the health, to enable the next leap in firing temper- trade-offs in temperature, pressure, flow rate, differences were not large in the regions up- ature and hence efficiency.” Tim Lieuwen, a re- and acoustics to predict optimal solutions. stream of the jet merging zone. This result sug- searcher on the team at Georgia Tech told Gas gests that the hydrodynamic influence of one to Power Journal. Helical flow in multi-nozzle swirling jet on the other is minimal and, as combustors such, that jet-jet interactions in this configura- Raising firing temperature One recent experiment carried out by the team tion do not have a significant influence on the Key to the team’s research efforts has been an was the investigation of transversely forced, unsteady flow structures,” the team state.