Combustion Technologies
High Thrust Bio-alcohols Combustor

The combustion of the green alcohols: Ethanol, Butanol, Methanol; under conditions that lead to the generation of high thrust effluents is necessary for some applications where high flowrate is required either for effective high rate of heat transfer such as with bioenergy steam generators for Bioenergy Distributed Power Generation Systems, or for effective high [momentum transfer] reaction force such as in boat engines and even jet engines. In some cases the existing systems needs retrofit adaptation to use the alcohols in other cases a completely new system design needs incorporating. The design - for implementation development - of such high-thrust alcohols combustor is readily configurable from an integration of liquid combustor design and gas combustor design.

Effectively the bio-alcohols combustor configuration is an integration of the known combustor designs: alcohols fuel burner- liquid fuel combustor, and the Syngas fuel combustor - a gas fuel combustor; derivative of the biofuel combustion base technology and should enable the use of liquid fuel in the gaseous state. The essence of the design is the use of the liquid fuel combustor to vaporize some of the fuel, preheat the gaseous fuel intake air, and possibly also provide some bootstrapping electricity.

Base Combustor Technologies Customizations

However, even before undertaking the integration of the two base combustor technologies, the base technologies have to be modified in order to be used for ethanol-liquid combustion and ethanol-vapor combustion. The turbine-based Fuel Combustion Burner necessarily as a use-specific customized variant of the base technology, syngas fuel combustor, also has to be modified in view of the water content in the ethanol vapor.

The salient customizations is that the fuel handling should address vapor, which thermodynamically is sort of dense gas instead of a true gas. As such the customization must aim to make the vapor-feed to behave as close to a true gas as possible. One such approach is to maintain the vapor at a high temperature, requiring the modification of the Fuel Burner Supply System.  As per design of the delivery system consists of two tubes and present for use two fluid outlets, one that is providing biogas and the other that provides air supply. Obviously, both the vapor fuel and air-feed supply lines must be heated along the delivery tube prior to being fed

Further, the Fuel-Air Mixing Zone, FAMZ, distance "h" from discharge pin-hole of the atomizer to the end of the burner cylinder chassis determined on the basis of flame propagation calculations, may be shorten somewhat to rapidly moderate the thermal cooling effect of the water vapor. Moreover, the length of the FAMZ, also depends on air-mixture ratios. Effectively, then the size of the discharge opening of the fuel atomizer-tip is of critical design and likely directly impacts the flame-sustainability of the fuel, and hence would have to be made larger as necessary.

Fuel Burner Base Vaporization Design

Beginning with the liquid combustor design, the combustion chamber of the burner is fitted with several vertically aligned tubes placed against the inner walls of the chamber cylinder. These tubes are connected at the bottom to the bio-alcohol reservoir(s). At the top the tubes are connected by as many inlet ports to a flow concentrator which is connected through a single outlet port to the BioFuel Burner Supply system for the gas fuel combustor. Effectively the Fuel Burner Supply System delivers fuel to the Fuel Combustion Burner as the application design specifications. During the delivery of the fuel to the Combustion Burner, the vapor is heated to a very high temperature as required above to maintain a state that is as close as possible to a pure gaseous state in contrast to a state of dense gas. Because of this requirement, the sequentially operation dependency of the fuel igniter, flow-sensor, and temperature sensor, embedded within the FAMZ are changed with the temperature sensor being the dominant sensor. The flow sensor must obtain confirmation of prevalence of flame-sustainability temperature before the flow-senser can send actuate signal to the fuel igniter.

The outlet of the liquid combustor is flanged and connected to the shell-side inlet of a large multi-tube single pass heat exchanger placed on the path of air inlet of the turbine gas fuel combustor, such that the air passes through the heat exchanger prior to getting into the combustion chamber of the turbine. The outlet of the exchanger is simply vented.

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