Abstract
Huge amount of by-products is still considered as waste and is simply disposed, for example by-product gas is usually flared. Political and social pressure to reduce air pollution and national needs for energy security make these waste fuels interesting for near-future power generation. Unfortunately most of these waste fuels, even when liquefied or gasified, have very low quality and can hardly be used in high-efficiency power systems. Among main challenges are low calorific value and composition fluctuation. Additionally very often there is a high content of sulphur, siloxanes, tars, etc., which have to be removed from the fuel. Modern 4-stroke gas engines designed for power generation applications provide very high efficiency, high reliability and availability. Unfortunately, these gas engines require high quality fuel with stable composition. Horus-Energia together with Cracow University of Technology developed a novel gas supply system HE-MUZG that can adapt to current gas quality and change engine settings accordingly.This article will present results from the HE-MUZG system tests on modern 4-stroke spark-ignition gas engine. Tests focus on low quality gas, such as gas with low calorific value, gas with very low methane number and gas with very big variations of calorific value. Test results compared with performance of that engine in the original configuration show huge improvements. Moreover the HE- MUZG system is easy to implement in commercial gensets.
Highlights
Modern 4-stroke gas engines are designed to operate with high reliability and high efficiency
Results show that the HE-MUZG system enables stable engine operation in wide range of fuel calorific value
It is important to highlight that the test genset was equipped with the engine originally tuned for operation on natural gas and the HE-MUZG system enabled operation with range of fuel calorific value wider even if compared with tuning of that engine for operation on biogas
Summary
Modern 4-stroke gas engines are designed to operate with high reliability and high efficiency. A 20cylinder spark-ignition gas engine can be equipped with more than 200 various sensors which gather continuously information about engine operation, combustion characteristics and help to optimise control settings such like airfuel-ratio, ignition advance etc. On one hand such complex control systems provide ultimate engine performance but on the other hand high quality of gas is required. There is a strong limitation for using fuels with very low methane number or very low calorific value, because these parameters determine available power of the engine. The results of broad tests are presented in this paper
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