Łukasz Breńkacz

Project no POIR.04.01.04-00-014/17

The aim of the project is to develop a system for the combined production of heat and electricity with a capacity of up to 30 kWe using biomass or coal.

The project is carried out by IMP PAN together with three companies with experience in the construction of turbines, compressors and boilers.

The aim of the project is to develop an innovative micro-cogeneration device with an electrical power of about 30 kW using the Brayton thermal cycle. The device will be a new product dedicated to the Polish and foreign prosumer microgeneration market, meeting the needs of thousands of industrial and service enterprises, large farms, food industry companies and municipal enterprises. 

The device will produce over 120 kW of thermal power, operating in unmanned mode and with a high level of reliability. It will consist of an incandescent solid fuel boiler (biomass, coal); a gas turbine driven by heated 850°C air from the boiler; a compressor and an electrical generator. The proposed solution, with air as the working medium - a widely available and clean medium, gives a huge advantage over other technologies. The innovation and technological advancement of the product includes the developed boiler design with a high-temperature radiation air preheater, which will allow a significant increase in heat transfer efficiency. 

Unlike typical gas microturbines that require gaseous or liquid fuels, the device will enable the use of two basic solid fuels - wood and hard coal. At the same time, thanks to burners using inertial particle separation already in the combustion chamber, the device will meet emission requirements for class 5 boilers. 

All critical components, i.e. the incandescent air boiler, radiation air heater and gas turbocharger will be based on Polish technologies and manufactured by the Consortium implementing the project. 

The installation will be mobile (in a container) in order to be adapted to the connection conditions of the future buyer.

Project value: 8,499,806.76 PLN
EU co-financing of the project: PLN 7,691,200.27

Foil bearings are one of the fastest-growing bearing types at present. They are widely used e.g. in aircraft engines and an increase in small power turbines. In some operating conditions they are the only feasible bearing system. They can be used in structures characterized by very high rotational speeds and very high temperatures. There are some technical problems associated with these bearings - difficult starting due to preloading of the film, or high vibration amplitude at nominal speed - due to the susceptible support layer: gas film and film support layer. All these problems can be solved by introducing active control of the bearing pan size - which is the subject of this project. Increasing the size of the pan during start-up will result in less wear of the supporting film, will reduce the starting torque, and may eliminate the use of an additional drive during the start-up of a machine running on film bearings. The ability to actively (during bearing operation) change the geometry will also enable smoother resonance transition, better compensation for temperature changes, and better adjustment of operating parameters over a wide speed range. The use of such control will also enable the safer operation of bearings. Such bearings are not currently available on the market. They are a continuation of research conducted for many years within the team of IMP PAN, and the proposed technical solutions are unique in the world. The project objectives will be achieved through numerical analysis, including the construction of new numerical models, design, construction and testing of a prototype bearing on a new laboratory bench.

Project no. LIDER/12/0073/L-8/16/NCBR/2017

Project acronym: TURBOCHILL

 The primary research objective is to develop technologies for high-speed, oil-free and hermetic radial refrigeration compressors of low and medium power (from a few kW to several tens of kW of driving power) that will meet high functional and operational requirements. The term "refrigeration compressors" should be understood broadly, i.e. it refers to equipment intended for operation in systems implementing refrigeration circuits in the broadly defined HVAC&R industry (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration). The features of the technology to be optimized are as follows:

efficiency,
durability,
noise level,
vibration level.

The ultimate goal of the project is the market implementation of the Polish technology of low and medium power radial refrigeration compressors.

Project value 1,200,000 PLN

Amount of NCBR funding 1,200,000 PLN

Rotating machines are the basic power machines, they also find other wide applications. The main components of a rotating machine are the rotor with blades and bearings along with the support structure. The rotor line concentrates the interactions of all the sub-systems of a rotating machine. Of particular importance here are the interactions of the sliding bearings expressed in terms of stiffness coefficients and oil film damping. It is worth noting that from a mathematical point of view, these coefficients link together the ordinary differential equations describing the motion of the entire system with the partial differential equations describing the spatial distributions of hydrodynamic pressure. In the project, the coefficients of stiffness and damping of sliding bearings were calculated for the system in the linear and nonlinear range, i.e. in the range occurring in practice. In the calculation model adopted, the Finite Element Method (FEM) with beam elements of six degrees of freedom at each node was used for the rotor line. A major computational problem is the calculation of the stiffness and damping coefficients of the sliding bearings at each time step of the iterative procedure. This fact makes the numerical calculations nonlinear. Even the most advanced commercial programs do not offer such solutions. The NLDW program developed and developed at the Institute of Fluid Flow Machinery, Polish Academy of Sciences, Gdansk, Poland, was used in this work.

1. Initial studies of cogeneration systems integrated with gasification and pyrolysis processes aimed at preparation of a series of distributed energy systems and taking into account:

• The target scale of the process,
• Different possibilities to use the gas product in cogeneration systems (combustion engine, fuel cell),
• Analysis of fuel availability and fuel selection,
• Process safety,
• Treatment of waste from the gasification process,
• Process optimization,
• Environmental impact assessment of technology implementation.

The main objective was to develop new technologies for obtaining and processing bioenergy carriers and new technologies for converting this energy into useful thermal and electrical energy. These technologies were to create the basis for the construction of energy nests based on local resources of renewable energy sources, especially biomass, and to contribute to the construction of agro-energy complexes, which are an effective form of implementation of the so-called small-scale distributed cogeneration. Among the technologies developed, the first place should be given to the proposed solutions for a home cogeneration microgrid, a fermentation biogas plant for aquatic plants, a multi-purpose, remotely controlled bioreactor set with cloud databases, or a prototype of a BIOB reactor coupled to SOFC fuel cells. This is a distinctive feature of the project innovation and a great opportunity for further work, of an applied nature. These proposals and results are absolutely original and have no equivalents in the country and abroad.