Development & Testing of Industrial Scale, Coal Fired Combustion System, Phase 3

In the first quarter of calendar year 1998, 4 days of tests on the 20 MMBtu/hr combustor-boiler facility were performed as part of a parallel project on sulfur capture in slag. No work was performed on the present project in this quarter. The total test days on the Philadelphia facility to the end of March 1998 was 108, of which 34 tests were part of the other DOE project. This exceeds the planned 63 test days for this project. All key project objectives have been exceeded including combustor durability, automated combustor operation, NOx emissions as low as 0.07 lb/MMBtu and SO2 emissions as low as 0.2 lb/MMBtu. In addition, a novel post-combustion NOx control process has been tested on a 37 MW and 100 MW utility boiler. Any further tests will depend on the results of evaluations of current and prior tests. The only effort remaining on this project is facility disassembly and Final Report. Almost all of the effort in the present quarter focussed on applying the results of this project and the parallel sulfur capture in slag project on new applications of this technology. Several very promising areas were identified and a number of proposals to implement them were prepared