Dual Brayton Cycle Gas Turbine Pressurized Fluidized Bed Combustion Power Plant Concept

High generating efficiency has compelling economic and environmental benefits for electric power plants. There are particular incentives to develop more efficient and cleaner coal-fired power plants, to permit use of the world’s most abundant and secure energy source. This paper presents a newly-conceived power plant design, the Dual Brayton Cycle Gas Turbine PFBC, that yields 45% net generating efficiency and fires on a wide range of fuels with minimum pollution, of which coal is a particularly intriguing target for its first application. The DBC-GT design allows power plants based on the state-of-the-art PFBC technology to achieve substantially higher generating efficiencies while simultaneously providing modern gas turbine and related heat exchanger technologies access to the large coal power generation market.