Soot formation GE Frame 5

Dear guys,

we got a GE Frame 5 from the 70s running on fuel oil. The unit has soot formataion issus at full load. In order to stay under the legal threshold we had to reduce the load to around 90% - here the soot formation is within the boundaries.

We changed the fuel oil nozzles, however there was no improvement. We suspect that the atomizing air compressor might be the probleme, exhaust pressure around 152 psi.

Has anyone a further hint how to validate this?

Thanks anyway

P.
 
There are all manner of liquid fuels--distillate (HSD--High Speed Diesel; #2 diesel; etc.), heavy fuel oil (bunker or residual fuel oil), and even light crude. What kind of liquid fuel, pray tell?

Replace or refurbish the Main Atomizing Air Compressor.

Ensure all AA solenoid- operated valves are working properly if the unit is dual fuel.

Usually, poor fuel atomization results in whitish exhaust smoke. Usually, dark exhaust smoke means the unit is overloaded--kind of hard to do with a gas turbine, but not impossible, I'm told but I've never seen an overloaded GE-design heavy duty gas turbine and can't really imagine how that would even happen.

Usually, the ratio of AA pressure to CPD is around 1.2:1 when burning liquid fuel. When running a dual fuel (gas/distillate) machine on gas fuel AA pressure is usually decreased to around 1.1:1 with respect to CPD.

Hope this helps. Please write back to let us know what you find.
 
By the way, those AA-to-CPD ratios were absolute--so add ambient pressure to both the AA gauge reading and the CPD gauge (transmitter) reading when calculating the ratio (divide the AA-plus-ambient pressure by the CPD-plus-ambient pressure to get the ratio).

Write back to let us know what you find.
 
Top