Principal Investigator Ahmed Ghoniem
Co-investigator Santosh Shanbhogue
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/rgd/www/CombustionDynamics/combustionDynamics.html
Syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced by burning coal in pure oxygen and steam in high pressure gasifiers, has been proposed as the fuel of choice for modern high efficiency low emission combined cycles power plant, in which gas turbine engines are used as topping cycles that take advantage of high temperature combustion products to improve the overall efficiency of the power plant. Incorporating technologies to filter out turbine-corroding gases from the gasifier products and delivering clean syngas to the gas turbine combustor enables the use of syngas in gas turbines. Furthermore, efficient separation technologies can be used to produce hydrogen from the syngas, which can then be fed into fuel cells to further improve the energy conversion efficiency of the plant. The sequestration of carbon dioxide, following the production of steam for the bottoming cycle, makes this plant environmentally ideal.