NOx CONTROL OPTIONS AND INTEGRATION FOR US COAL FIRED BOILERS

This is the sixth Quarterly Technical Report for DOE Cooperative Agreement No: DE-FC26-00NT40753. The goal of the project is to develop cost effective analysis tools and techniques for demonstrating and evaluating low NOx control strategies and their possible impact on boiler performance for firing US coals. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is providing co-funding for this program. This program contains multiple tasks and good progress is being made on all fronts. Preliminary results from laboratory and field tests of a corrosion probe to predict waterwall wastage indicate good agreement between the electrochemical noise corrosion rates predicted by the probe and corrosion rates measured by a surface profilometer. Four commercial manufacturers agreed to provide catalyst samples to the program. BYU has prepared two V/Ti oxide catalysts (custom, powder form) containing commercially relevant concentrations of V oxide and one containing a W oxide promoter. Two pieces of experimental apparatus being built at BYU to carry out laboratory-scale investigations of SCR catalyst deactivation are nearly completed. A decision was made to carry out the testing at full-scale power plants using a slipstream of gas instead of at the University of Utah pilot-scale coal combustor as originally planned. Design of the multi-catalyst slipstream reactor was completed during this quarter. One utility has expressed interest in hosting a long-term test at one of their plants that co-fire wood with coal. Tests to study ammonia adsorption onto fly ash have clearly established that the only routes that can play a role in binding significant amounts of ammonia to the ash surface, under practical ammonia slip conditions, are those that must involve co-adsorbates