SYSTEM MODELS CONSIDERING COMPONENT OPERATING WINDOWS AND PLANT CHP OPERATING SCENARIOS

BLAZE (Biomass Low cost Advanced Zero Emission small-to-medium scale integrated gasifier-fuel cell combined heat and power plant) aims at developing an innovative highly efficient and fuel flexible small and medium-scale biomass CHP (Combined Heat and Power generation) technology. This report summarises the work corresponding to T4.1. In Section 3, we point out the biomass types that has been selected in D2.1 to be used in the BLAZE plant. In Section 4, we summarise the relevant input regarding contaminants from D3.2. The BLAZE plant layout is described in Section 5, before explaining the operating windows in Section 6, the operating scenarios in Section 7, and the preliminary plant models and results, in Section 8.
The results show that the combined heat and power efficiency can go up to 70 % within the selected working conditions and layouts. The importance of selecting the most favourable operating conditions and layout for the (i) gasifier and the (ii) SOFC large stack module (LSM) individually is pointed out, as the system evaluation of different plant layouts show in fact similar final results. At system level, under the current hypotheses and pre-determined heat exchanger network (HEN), the best option is the process flow diagram (PFD) B (not only in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of layout simplicity compared with PFD F). However, note that the final results do not point out a “much better” and a “much worst” solution but, it can be said that, due to the trade-offs identified in terms of auxiliaries’ consumption, final temperatures, heating and cooling needs, the results of PFD’s B, D2 and F do not differ too much from each other (except for the layout and operating conditions differences).