Mas­ter­ing Danger­ous Vi­bra­tions

AIC: Ac­tive damp­ing of com­bus­tion os­cil­la­tions

If com­bus­tion os­cil­la­tion can­not be avoid­ed, the IFTA AIC sys­tem will damp them in order to pro­tect the ma­chine. Until today, our AIC (ACTIVE INSTABILITY CONTROL) is till a tech­ni­cal­ly unique so­lu­tion for the ac­tive reg­u­la­tion of com­bus­tion os­cil­la­tions and com­pres­sor in­sta­bil­i­ties with ac­tive damp­ing. This so­phis­ti­cat­ed pro­tec­tion con­cept is used es­pe­cial­ly in areas where con­ven­tion­al meth­ods fail. AIC con­tains the com­po­nents for sig­nal mea­sure­ment + stor­age + ac­tive pro­tec­tion using spe­cial high-per­for­mance valves and lin­ear mo­tors in real-time. This al­lows to sta­bi­lize a flame or to blow away a stall cell.

Espe­cial­ly in sit­u­a­tions where it is not pos­si­ble to avoid com­bus­tion os­cil­la­tions,  e.g. due to a change in com­bus­tion con­trol, ac­tive damp­ing with AIC is the only pos­si­ble so­lu­tion.

 

AIC
  • Mea­sure­ment
  • Anal­y­sis
  • Mon­i­tor­ing
  • Ac­tive Damp­ing
  • Ac­tive damp­ing of self-ex­cit­ed com­bus­tion os­cil­la­tions, also known as ther­moa­cous­tic os­cil­la­tions, pul­sa­tions or hum­ming
  • Use in tur­bines: from sin­gle burn­er to mul­ti­ple burn­er plants to large sta­tion­ary gas tur­bines
  • World­wide well-proven sys­tem

What Makes the Ac­tive In­sta­bil­i­ty Con­trol (AIC) Unique?

Ad­van­tages of the AIC

Com­pared to the IFTA Ar­gusOMDS sys­tem, the IFTA AIC sys­tem dif­fers pri­mar­i­ly by the DSP firmware. In the in­dus­try, the re­ac­tion speed is re­gard­ed as out­stand­ing - sam­ple by sam­ple is pro­cessed and con­trolled in real-time.

  • Ac­qui­si­tion of up to 16 sen­sor sig­nals and con­trol of up to 32 ac­tu­a­tors
  • Au­to­mat­ic set­ting of the con­trol pa­ram­e­ters
  • Mo­du­lar de­sign
  • Com­plete in­te­gra­tion into the con­trol sys­tem via dig­i­tal, ana­log or field-bus in­ter­faces such as Profibus, Mod­bus, Can-Bus

Fields of ap­pli­ca­tion:

  • In­dus­tri­al or sta­tion­ary gas tur­bines
  • Large in­dus­tri­al com­bus­tion sys­tems such as process gas heaters

Ac­tive vs. pas­sive pro­tec­tion

Com­pared to pas­sive pro­tec­tive mea­sures, AIC of­fers the fol­low­ing ad­van­tages:

  • Easy up­grade for ex­ist­ing ap­pli­ca­tions
  • No cost and time in­ten­sive retrofitting of the com­bus­tion sys­tem nec­es­sary
  • Ef­fi­cien­cy, sta­bil­i­ty and con­struc­tion of the com­bus­tion sys­tem are not neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed - no ad­di­tion­al loss­es occur due to the Argus AIC sys­tem
  • Pol­lu­tant emis­sions are even par­tial­ly re­duced, e.g. NOx and un­burned fuel/gas
  • The con­trol is able to adapt to the ac­tu­al sys­tem be­hav­ior and its changes

Ac­tive In­sta­bil­i­ty Con­trol for Sta­tion­ary Gas Tur­bines

Siemens En­er­gy Relies on Proven IFTA Tech­nol­o­gy

As a re­sult of many years of uni­ver­si­ty re­search work by Dr.-Ing. Jakob Her­mann (gen­er­al man­ag­er IFTA GmbH) in this field, IFTA GmbH suc­ceed­ed for the first time in 1997 in suc­cess­ful­ly ap­ply­ing this tech­nol­o­gy to large sta­tion­ary gas tur­bines with an out­put of over 240 MW from Siemens En­er­gy Glob­al GmbH & Co. KG to es­tab­lish it as an in­dus­try stan­dard.

Sys­tems in wide­spread use

Since 1997, ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 of these sys­tems have been suc­cess­ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed in sta­tion­ary gas tur­bines world­wide. In ad­di­tion to their high ef­fi­cien­cy in the damp­ing of com­bus­tion os­cil­la­tions, their out­stand­ing fea­tures in­clude high sys­tem avail­abil­i­ty and re­li­a­bil­i­ty, which led to un­re­strict­ed cus­tomer ac­cep­tance and high sat­is­fac­tion.