An operational approach for the designing of an energy integrated oxy-fuel CFB power plant

This work deals with a suitable and flexible design to increase the overall efficiency of an oxy-fuel combustion power plant working with high O2 concentration. Waste energy has been integrated avoiding any potential risk/damage into a new designed steam cycle. Applied solutions try to use lower cost proven materials in heat exchangers and simple equipment designs avoiding gas-gas heaters. Novel arrangements are presented, such as indirect heat exchangers, plastic heaters or different configurations integrating high pressure feedwater and low pressure condensate mass flows. Finally, results are compared with a previously optimized power plant design without operational restrictions and just a slight reduction in power plant net efficiency (less than 1%) was observed between both concepts.