The Scale-up and Economic Evaluation of Non-Thermal Plasma Technology for a Coal Fired Power Plant Exhaust Gas Emission Control

Abstract Economies of pollution control devices are critical to the decision-making in power plant emission control upgrades. The computer code (SUENTP) to predict scale up and economic evaluation of several eligible non-thermal plasma processes for power plant gaseous pollution controls was developed for electron beam, pulsed corona, and corona radical shower processes. This code was written by the spread sheet type MS Excel with visual basic for application and comprises data input procedure, scale-up (design) procedure, economic calculation procedure, and output procedures. Data obtained from pilot plant tests was used as an input data together with general data so that they might be led to the conceptual design data of commercial plants by scaleup procedure. The economic evaluation procedure consisted of the total capital investment and the total annual cost. The total capital investment was presented as the indirect annual cost in items of capital recovery. The levelized cost and the levelized bus bar cost were shown in the output table. Typical calculation was presented to evaluate the cost of three non-thermal systems based on existing pilot plant experiments. The results show that the economy of the non-thermal plasma systems are similar or less costs by compared with a conventional wet-scrubber/selective catalytic reduction combined system.