Power Plant Engineering

238 POWER PLANT ENGINEERING

8.3.4 High Compression Gas Engines

With operation solely on gas, without duel mixtures and pilot oil, the high Compression Gas
Engines of today use slightly richer mixtures of fuel and air, with lower compression ratios than duel
fuel engines. The compression ratios are higher than conventional gas engines and lower than duel fuel
engines. There is no need of pilot oil.

8.4 Advantage of Diesel Power Plant

The advantages of diesel power plants are listed below.

1. Very simple design also simple installation.


2. Limited cooling water requirement.


3. Standby losses are less as compared to other Power plants.


4. Low fuel cost.


5. Quickly started and put on load.


6. Smaller storage is needed for the fuel.


7. Layout of power plant is quite simple.


8. There is no problem of ash handling.


9. Less supervision required.


10. For small capacity, diesel power plant is more efficient as compared to steam power plant.


11. They can respond to varying loads without any difficulty.

8.5 Disadvantage of Diesel Power Plant

The disadvantages of diesel power plants are listed below.

1. High Maintenance and operating cost.


2. Fuel cost is more, since in India diesel is costly.


3. The plant cost per kW is comparatively more.


4. The life of diesel power plant is small due to high maintenance.


5. Noise is a serious problem in diesel power plant.


6. Diesel power plant cannot be constructed for large scale.

8.6 Application of Diesel Power Plant

Since there are many disadvantage of diesel power plant, although the plant find wide applica-
tion in the following fields.

1. They are quite suitable for mobile power generation and are widely used in transportation
   systems consisting of railroads, ships, automobiles and aeroplanes.


2. They can be used for electrical power generation in capacities from 100 to 5000 H.P.


3. They can be used as standby power plants.


4. They can be used as peak load plants for some other types of power plants.