Experimental and numerical investigation of the application of fast pyrolysis oil in a gas turbine combustor

The growing demand for more economical and environmentally friendly power generation forces the industry to search for fuels that can replace conventional fossil fuels. Fast pyrolysis oil is an example of these alternative fuels. Pyrolysis of biomass is one of the most promising ways to directly generate liquid fuels from biomass. However, pyrolysis oil may have several major drawbacks which suppress its application. Within the ERA-NET EnCat project several aspects of pyrolysis oil comprising production processes, characterization as well as combustion in gas turbines and engines are approached. The present work focusses on the application of fast pyrolysis oil in a gas turbine. A combined numerical and experimental approach has been applied to a real scale gas turbine combustor for the OPRA OP16 gas turbine. This includes full scale combustor tests with various fuels and advanced CFD simulations. When operating on solely pyrolysis oil, it was found that stable operation could be achieved in the 30-100% load. Advanced char burnout simulations have been performed, which determined the optimal conditions for pyrolysis oil combustion. The newly developed NOx formation and pyrolysis oil combustion model show a good agreement with experimental data.