BHEL achieves major breakthrough by developing fuel flexible supercritical boilers

 India’s power generation is mainly coal-based and the power sector is currently plagued by coal shortages where power plants are stranded due to non-availability of indigenous coal supplies. This has triggered a series of companies to either resort to operating the plant on part load due to non-availability of domestic coal or make up for the shortfall by blending indigenous coal with imported coal. The performance of power equipment is dependent on the coal being fed to the power plant.
Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. (BHEL), a Maharatna PSU, has been designing boilers for the past 30 years and has extensive experience of designing boilers fired with indigenous as well as imported coals, exhibiting several variations. Based on BHEL’s extensive experience of working with a great variety of indigenous as well as imported coals over the years, BHEL has developed a new boiler with fuel flexibility of indigenous and imported coals. BHEL is now ready to offer the new boiler design to overcome these issues.
This new boiler design is based on a unique combination of indigenous imported coals but capable of firing both extremes of 100 per cent domestic coal as well as 100 per cent imported coal. It will provide developers with much needed freedom regarding the ratio of blending as well as the characteristics of the domestic and imported coal to be blended. This enables the boiler to work over the entire range of blending ratios and would protect the project developers against the vagaries in coal availability, thereby providing him with an opportunity to operate the plant throughout the year.
BHEL has a state-of-the-art coal research centre at its Tiruchirappalli plant which will be used to identify the unique combination of blended coal after analysing imported and domestic coal samples supplied by the customers. The associated boiler auxiliaries, also manufactured by BHEL, will be designed to accommodate the variation during firing of different type of fuels.