7EA Experience With Water Cooled Liquid Fuel
7EA Experience With Water Cooled Liquid Fuel
7EA Experience With Water Cooled Liquid Fuel
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It’s important to recognize that the switch to the • Replace fuel nozzles.
JASC solution was not a matter of just cutting
out a few valves, welding in some new ones, and Barrera said this was his first experience with the
hooking up water supply and return lines. Also JASC solution. He rated the project “challenging,”
needed was OEM support to modify the Mark V primarily because of the controls-logic changes
controls from three-way purge-valve operation to necessary, a different basket of plumbing
water-cooled liquid-fuel check valve operation. hardware to deal with, prefab effort, fuel system
cleaning, etc.
PAL Engineering, a unit of Pond And Lucier LLC,
Clifton Park, NY, was retained as GRU’s technical INSTALLATION
advisor for the combustor inspection. Project
Water for cooling the check valves comes off
Manager Carlo Barrera, mechanical TA and startup
the closed cooling-water system (70% water, 30%
engineer, said this CI essentially was a modified
glycol), which also supplies the lube-oil cooler
HGP that took nearly eight weeks and included the
and other auxiliaries—including the small heat
following tasks:
exchanger that reduces the temperature of
compressor discharge air for purge, atomizing, and
• Convert from three-way purge valves to water- fuel-nozzle cooling purposes.
cooled check valves.
One inch cooling-water supply and return
• Replace first-stage turbine nozzles, which manifolds were installed (Fig A) to serve all
exhibited severe cracking. combustors in parallel. Fig B shows that cooling
water flows to the primary fuel nozzle first and
• Clean the fuel-oil system to assure as-new-as- then to the secondary nozzle (in series).
possible condition prior to restart.
Flex line
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Cleaning of the fuel system required an effort that should not be underestimated, continued Hollandsworth.
He said a holistic approach was used to make sure the job was done properly. Hydrolazing was used to cut
through coke in fuel lines and remove it from the system. System clean-up took about a week. Truck with
necessary equipment is in Fig E, worker protection required in Fig F. Process gets results: Coke removed is in
Fig G.
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1. The flow divider was gunked up, corroded, and inoperable (Fig H); it was replaced.
All work complete, recommissioning of the liquid fuel system was reasonably straight-forward. The system
has been exercised monthly for the last year and has met expectations. It also has participated successfully
in alerts, which requires burning oil.
GRU’s standard 30-min test: Unit is started on gas, switched to oil and run up to at least 60 MW, allowing
check-out of the primary and secondary purge-air and water-injection systems. Then load is reduced and
the unit transferred back to natural gas for shutdown. After shutdown, atomizing air and check-valve cooling
water continue to run for eight hours.
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