Thermodynamic and experimental analysis of a biomass steam power plant: critical issues and their possible solutions with CCGT systems

This paper shows the experimental and numerical analysis of a biomass steam power plant from maximum power of 2.3 MW with a maximum pressure of 48 bar and a turbine inlet temperature of about 430 °C at the design point. The analysis has been conducted using experimental data, collected directly on the power plant, at the design point, and they have been afterwards used to validate a thermodynamic model. The analysis of the biomass power plant pointed out some critical issues that can be summarized in three points: low plant efficiency due to the small size, biomass supply range and continuous variation of the operating point. In order to solve this problem, different plant configurations were numerically evaluated. The first solution to these problems consists of a 100 kWe micro gas turbine (MGT) fueled by natural gas, whose exhaust gas were sent to the steam generator of the biomass power plant in order to evaluate the benefits on the power fluctuations and on global electric efficiency. A thermodynamic model of the MGT has been developed and validated with experimental data from technical literature, creating a CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) system. The analysis of the results of this system showed improvement in terms of efficiency and operational stability. The second option was to fuel the previously validated method of MGT with four different alternative fuels and to evaluate the integration with the biomass plant for all of them. Furthermore, to emphasize the benefits of this integration, the power of the micro turbine has been increased assuming the use of more MGT at the same time. These analyses show an increase of the system efficiency, it could been also used the biomass, not suitable for direct combustion (high humidity), to produce biogas that fuels the MGT, reducing the range of biomass supply.