Improving Geothermal Steam Purity for a Wellhead Geothermal Power Plant
Author: Lárus Guðmundsson
Year: 2015
Supervisor: Einar Jón Ásbjörnsson
The project was conducted in cooperation with Green Energy Group Ltd
Abstract
For geothermal turbines the purity of the steam can make or break the power plant, high maintenance results in more downtime and less revenue for the power company. In this paper it is attempted to design and model a device that can clean the steam to reduce scaling potential and reduce the maintenance on the turbine by condensing the hot steam partially and by introducing it to intense vorticity to mix the condensed droplets thus reducing the concentration of total dissolved solids (TDS) that are carried over in the brine from the two-phase separator. By introducing the proposed equipment as an addition to the hotter side of the power plant a dilution of TDS in the droplets can be ten-folds in theory, depending on the performance of the mist eliminator that takes out that last condensate.
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