High Pressure Testing With Optical Diagnostics of a Hydrogen Retrofit Solution to Eliminate Carbon Emissions

Ensuring grid stability is becoming an increasingly large challenge as the amounts of power from new highly fluctuating sources like solar and wind are increasing. Fuel flexible gas turbines which can run on carbon free or low carbon fuels offer grid stability both on the basis of their inertia and the possibility to quickly ramp-up and down. A consortium led by Thomassen Energy is at work at realizing a cost-effective, ultra-low emissions (sub 9ppm NOx and CO) combustion system for gas turbines in the 1–300 MW output range. A key requirement is fuel flexibility and stable operation from 100% natural gas to 100% hydrogen and any mixture thereof. This paper describes the results of the second step in the testing cycle of the developed combustion technology. In this step the FlameSheet™ is validated at machine operating conditions. The tests are completed using a state-of-the-art test setup combined with novel optical analysis techniques. The results show that one of the developed hardware variants can run on a wide range of fuel compositions up to 100% hydrogen without flashback while emissions are below 9 ppm at 15% O2 dry conditions.