Ammonia-Free NOx Control System

This report describes a novel NOx control system that has the potential to drastically reduce cost, and enhance performance, operation and safety of power plant NOx control. The new system optimizes the burner and the furnace to achieve very low NOx levels and to provide an adequate amount of CO, and uses the CO for reducing NO both in-furnace and over a downstream AFSCR (ammonia-free selective catalytic reduction) reactor. The AF-SCR combines the advantages of the highly successful SCR technology for power plants and the TWC (three-way catalytic converter) widely used on automobiles. Like the SCR, it works in oxidizing environment of combustion flue gas and uses only base metal catalysts. Like the TWC, the AF-SCR removes NO and excess CO simultaneously without using any external reagent, such as ammonia. This new process has been studied in a development program jointed funded by the US Department of Energy and Foster Wheeler. The report outlines the experimental catalyst work performed on a bench-scale reactor, including test procedure, operating conditions, and results of various catalyst formulations. Several candidate catalysts, prepared with readily available transition metal oxides and common substrate materials, have shown over 80-90% removal for both NO and CO in oxidizing gas mixtures and at elevated temperatures. A detailed combustion study of a 400 MWe coal-fired boiler, applying computational fluid dynamics techniques to model boiler and burner design, has been carried out to investigate ways to optimize the combustion process for the lowest NOx formation and optimum CO/NO ratios. Results of this boiler and burner optimization work are reported. The paper further discusses catalyst scale-up considerations and the conceptual design of a 400 MWe size AF-SCR reactor, as well as economics analysis indicating large cost savings of the ammonia-free NOx control process over the current SCR technology