diesel storage and treatment

[someguy79]

I'm working on a backup fuel system for a gas-turbine generation station. It's a set of natural gas fired turbines with HRSG, steam turbines, etc. The backup fuel is #2 diesel. Build stage one will have facilities for a test run (several hours) on liquid fuel. Build stage two will have facilities to run a couple of weeks on liquid fuel.

All comments from this point use fuel interchangeably with liquid fuel,and diesel.

In this scenario, it's possible that the diesel fuel will never be used, but always needs to be ready.

Granted, getting good fuel from a trusted source and testing it regularly are going to be important. What I'm concerned with is the treatment methods that will be necessary.

The client has been rather vague on what they need to handle for contaminants.

With diesel, I assume the mineral content (sodium, potassium, vanadium, lead) shouldn't be a problem if the fuel is good as-delivered.

During long term storage, I know water can accumulate, microbes can generate sludge, and solids settling can settle out and potentially clog things up. These seem to be the easy problems to solve. Water draw-off, biocide injection, and filtering should deal with these readily.

There is a push to use centrifuges for water and sludge removal, but I'm not sure that's the right way to go about it.

Why should I, or should I not use centrifuges for fuel treatment/separation instead of a simpler technology like coalescers and filters?

Is there a good resource I should be using (aside from the turbine mfr. and fuel supplier data) for making these decisions?

It's a long post, but giving some background info is the only way I can figure to get relevant responses. Thanks for reading.

 

[orenda1168]

I suggest you contact several fuel oil additive suppliers such as Baker-Hughes, Nalco, etc. as these folk have many decades of hands-on experience with distillate fuel storage and stability issues including fuel quality, mechanical and chemical considerations.

Orenda

 

[BigInch]

I would recommend that you do not include any of that equipment at all in your design.

The client should either burn the stored fuel at no more than 1 year interval, after testing to insure it is still in good enough condition to burn in your turbine, or burn it in a boiler where high quality is not required, or sell it off to a re-refiner, or trade it back to his supplier for a fresh batch, if it goes bad. No point installing all that treating equipment to use once in 3 to 5 years, unless you are really designing a long term fuel storage site and the power application is just being installed to provide power to that storage facility. You could probably count on that equipment not working when you eventually wanted to use it anyway.

I would not expect it to go bad within 1 year, or even two, but stranger things have happened given that there is some possibility to develop contaminations during worse case environmental conditions. Burn it or lose it. Don't waste your money on the equipment to treat it once in a blue moon unless you've got one heck of a good reason to do it.

 

[rmw]

There have been several good threads regarding the mitigation of fuel oil (including some aviation fuel) storage woes on this site. Do a search for some interesting reading.

rmw