On the operation of a high pressure biomass gasifier with gas turbine

Abstract

Gas turbine operations with liquid and gaseous fossil fuels are an established route for power generation. Use of low calorific value fuel like producer gas in gas turbine is not well established and currently there are no Gas turbines designed for this fuel. This paper focuses on the work done at the Combustion Gasification and Propulsion Laboratory of Indian Institute of Science to develop a high pressure gasifier to handle variety of biomass and fuel a gas turbine. The gas turbine explored in this work is Rover's gas turbine designed for Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) operation. The adaptation of combustion chamber to accept producer gas as fuel is also discussed. The combustion chamber of the Rovers turbine was retained and the liquid fuel injector was replaced with gas distributor. Experiments on the combustor were conducted with producer gas at ambient pressure and elevated pressure to test the ease of ignition and stability. Several distributor designs were experimented to establish the right type for obtaining stoichiometric air and fuel mixing at the spark plug. The gas turbine was run with producer gas, the efficiency with aviation turbine fuel and with biomass was found to be roughly same.