This is the eighteenth Quarterly Technical Report for DOE Cooperative Agreement No: DEFC26-00NT40753. The goal of the project is to develop cost effective analysis tools and techniques for demonstrating and evaluating low NOx control strategies and their possible impact on boiler performance for boilers firing US coals. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is providing co-funding for this program. Safety equipment for ammonia for the SCR slipstream reactor at Plant Gadsden was installed. The slipstream reactor was started and operated for about 1400 hours during the last performance period. Laboratory analysis of exposed catalyst and investigations of the sulfation of fresh catalyst continued at BYU. Thicker end-caps for the ECN probes were designed and fabricated to prevent the warpage and failure that occurred at Gavin with the previous design. A refurbished ECN probe was successfully tested at the University of Utah combustion laboratory. Improvements were implemented to the software that controls the flow of cooling air to the ECN probes.

This is the fifteenth Quarterly Technical Report for DOE Cooperative Agreement No: DE-FC26-00NT40753. The goal of the project is to develop cost effective analysis tools and techniques for demonstrating and evaluating low NOx control strategies and their possible impact on boiler performance for boilers firing US coals. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) is providing co-funding for this program. At AEP's Gavin Plant, data from the corrosion probes showed that corrosion rate increased as boiler load was increased. During an outage at the plant, the drop in boiler load, sensor temperature and corrosion rate could all be seen clearly. Restarting the boiler saw a resumption of corrosion activity. This behavior is consistent with previous observations made at a 600MWe utility boiler. More data are currently being examined for magnitudes of corrosion rates and changes in boiler operating conditions. Considerable progress was made this quarter in BYU's laboratory study of catalyst deactivation. Surface sulfation appears to partially suppress NO adsorption when the catalyst is not exposed to NH3; NH3 displaces surface-adsorbed NO on SCR catalysts and surface sulfation increases the amount of adsorbed NH3, as confirmed by both spectroscopy and TPD experiments. However, there is no indication of changes in catalyst …