Pulse Combustor Design, A DOE Assessment

The goal of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Clean Coal Technology (CCT) program is to furnish the energy marketplace with a number of advanced, more efficient, and environmentally responsible coal utilization technologies through demonstration projects. These projects seek to establish the commercial feasibility of the most promising advanced coal technologies that have developed beyond the proof-of-concept stage. This document serves as a DOE post-project assessment (PPA) of a project selected in CCT Round IV, the Pulse Combustor Design Qualification Test, as described in a Report to Congress (U.S. Department of Energy 1992). Pulse combustion is a method intended to increase the heat-transfer rate in a fired heater. The desire to demonstrate the use of pulse combustion as a source of heat for the gasification of coal, thus avoiding the need for an oxygen plant, prompted ThermoChem, Inc. (TCI), to submit a proposal for this project. In October 1992, TCI entered into a cooperative agreement with DOE to conduct this project. In 1998, the project was restructured and scaled down, and in September 1998, a new cooperative agreement was signed. The site of the revised project was TCI's facilities in Baltimore, Maryland. The original purpose of this CCT project was to demonstrate a unit that would employ ten identical 253-resonance tube combustors in a coal gasification unit. The objective of the scaled-down project was to test a single 253-resonance-tube combustor in a fluidized sand bed, with gasification being studied in a process development unit (PDU). DOE provided 50 percent of the total project funding of $8.6 million. The design for the demonstration unit was completed in February 1999, and construction was completed in November 2000. Operations were conducted in March 2001