Parametric study of potential early commercial mhd power plants

Abstract

The major objective of this program is to develop information on the performance, cost, natural resource requirements and environmental impact, and technical feasibility and development requirements of commercial scale moderate technology MHD/steam power plants, in order to identify attractive entry level power plant designs. These attractive power plants shall have acceptable performance and acceptable cost of electricity but shall not require the development of high temperature air heaters directly fired with hot MHD generator exhaust gas. Thus, the development requirements and hence, development costs and times for these moderate technology entry level power plants is considered to be less than those for more advanced and mature power plant designs defined by previous studies such as ECAS. The parametric analysis considered the following three different reference MHD power plants: Case I: power plant with separately fired high temperature air heater and the use of state-of-the-art gasifier and heat exchanger technology; Case II: power plant with separately fired high temperature air heater and the use of advanced gasifier and heat exchanger technology; and Case III: power plant with the use of oxygen enrichment of the combustion air. The overall power system designs and the results of performance calculations for the assumed basic plant design conditions and all parametric variations are described for each reference plant separately. (WHK)