McDermott Tech. to Head Team To Test Materials for 21st Century Power Plant

The high-efficiency power plant of the 21st century may still be on the utility industry's drawing boards, but the new high-strength, corrosion resistant alloys that will make these power plants possible are about to enter the "real life" testing stage.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a contract to McDermott Technology, Inc., Alliance, OH, to test 10 of the most promising of these alloys in a coal-fired boiler at Ohio Edison's Niles (OH) Power Station.

DOE, through its Federal Energy Technology Center, will provide $700,000 of a $1.9 million contract for a five-year testing program to identify candidate materials for tomorrow's advanced boilers. McDermott will head a team made up of Babcock & Wilcox, Consol of Library, PA, the Ohio Coal Development Office, DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Ohio Edison.

Several of the alloys have been developed in DOE's advanced materials research program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Researchers now want to see how well their metallurgical properties, welds and other design characteristics hold up under increasingly higher temperatures in an actual power plant environment. Some of the materials are still in the experimental stage, and the testing will identify whether these alloys are sufficiently promising to warrant further development and ultimately ASME boiler code certification testing.

The results will be a key step in designing tomorrow's higher-efficiency, super-critical coal-fired power plants. Super-critical plants create steam under high pressures that is much hotter than the steam produced by a typical coal-burning power plant. Boosting steam temperatures raises a power plant's operating efficiency which, in turn, makes the plant more economical to operate, generates lower cost electricity, and perhaps most importantly, produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

At higher temperatures, however, the metals used in a boiler's steam tubes are more prone to corrosion caused by hot coal ash depositing on the tubes.

At the Niles Power Station, the new, more corrosion-resistant alloys will be positioned in specially-designed, high-temperature test rigs between tube bundles called the superheater and reheater that increase the temperature of steam.

For up to five years, the alloys will be subjected to temperatures of 1050 degrees F to 1150 degrees F, well above the steam temperatures of today's standard boilers which typically range from 950 to 1000 degrees F. At the end of one, three and five years, each rig will be removed and metallurgically evaluated for the effects of corrosion.

The team will also calculate the expected effect on overall plant costs using the materials shown by the tests to be the most promising. Using a plant design based on DOE's advanced low-emission boiler system, analysts will determine overall power production costs that might be expected from 21^st century plants that incorporate these new, corrosion-resistant alloys.

The project manager for McDermott Technology will be Dennis McDonald. DOE's involvement will be overseen by its Federal Energy Technology Center, one of the agency's major field organizations with operations at Pittsburgh, PA., and Morgantown, WV.

-End of TechLine-

For more information, contact:
Robert C. Porter, Office of Fossil Energy, 202-586-6503
Otis Mills, Federal Energy Technology Center, 412-892-5890

Technical information contact:
Richard Read, Federal Energy Technology Center, 412-892-5721