Søren Lovmand Hvid

Co-firing straw with coal in a swirl-stabilized dual-feed burner: modelling and experimental validation.

This paper presents a comprehensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling study of co-firing wheat straw with coal in a 150kW swirl-stabilized dual-feed burner flow reactor, in which the pulverized straw particles (mean diameter of 451microm) and coal particles (mean diameter of 110.4microm) are independently fed into the burner through two concentric injection tubes, i.e., the centre and annular tubes, respectively. Multiple simulations are performed, using three meshes, two global reaction mechanisms for homogeneous combustion, two turbulent combustion models, and two models for fuel particle conversion. It is found that for pulverized biomass particles of a few hundred microns in diameter the intra-particle heat and mass transfer is a secondary issue at most in their conversion, and the global four-step mechanism of Jones and Lindstedt may be better used in modelling volatiles combustion. The baseline CFD models show a good agreement with the measured maps of main species in the reactor. The straw particles, less affected by the swirling secondary air jet due to the large fuel/air jet momentum and large particle response time, travels in a nearly straight line and penetrate through the oxygen-lean core zone; whilst the coal particles are significantly affected by secondary air jet and swirled into the oxygen-rich outer radius with increased residence time (in average, 8.1s for coal particles vs. 5.2s for straw particles in the 3m high reactor). Therefore, a remarkable difference in the overall burnout of the two fuels is predicted: about 93% for coal char vs. 73% for straw char. As the conclusion, a reliable modelling methodology for pulverized biomass/coal co-firing and some useful co-firing design considerations are suggested.

Modeling and experiments of biomass combustion in a large-scale grate boiler

Grate furnaces are currently a main workhorse in large-scale firing of biomass for heat and power production. A biomass grate fired furnace can be interpreted as a cross-flow reactor, where biomass is fed in a thick layer perpendicular to the primary air flow. The bottom of the biomass bed is exposed to preheated inlet air while the top of the bed resides within the furnace. Mathematical modeling is an efficient way to understand and improve the operation and design of combustion systems. Compared to modeling of pulverized fuel furnaces, CFD modeling of biomass-fired grate furnaces is inherently more difficult due to the complexity of the solid biomass fuel bed on the grate, the turbulent reacting flow in the combustion chamber and the intensive interaction between them. This paper presents the CFD validation efforts for a modern large-scale biomass-fired grate boiler. Modeling and experiments are both done for the grate boiler. The comparison between them shows an overall acceptable agreement in tendency. However at some measuring ports, big discrepancies between the modeling and the experiments are observed, mainly because the modeling-based boundary conditions (BCs) could differ quite much with the conditions in the real furnace. Combustion instabilities in the fuel bed impose big challenges to give reliable grate inlet BCs for the CFD modeling; the deposits formed on furnace walls and air nozzles make it difficult to define precisely the wall BCs and air jet BCs that a reliable CFD needs. The CFD results show reasonably the mixing and combustion performance in the furnace based on the design drawings; while the measurement results reflect reliably the combustion performance in the real furnace in operation.