(180ap) Development of Advanced Coal Gasification Kinetics Models for CFD (and process simulation) Codes

The objective of this research is to implement detailed kinetic expressions for the gasification of a wide variety of coals in existing CFD codes such as MFIX. These expressions describe the fundamental steps taking place in the gasification of coal, namely, coal devolatilization, tar-gas chemistry, soot formation, the heterogeneous and homogeneous gasification reactions along with combustion reactions. For this purpose, the data generated by PC Coal Lab licensed by Niksa Energy Associates LLC will be used to simulate the gasification of various coals in CFD codes. The CFD code of most interest is MFIX, which is used to describe the hydrodynamics, heat transfer and chemical reactions in the reacting fluid-solids systems comprising the contents of a gasifier. The implementation of coal gasification kinetics in MFIX is currently done through a set of subroutines making up the Carbonaceous Chemistry for Continuum Modeling (C3M) code. C3M has default gasification kinetics for only a few coals. While on the other hand, PC Coal lab can predict the gasification kinetics for over 2000 coal species. Therefore this project focuses on the development of a seamless connection between PC Coal Lab and the C3M .The interface will be designed to allow MFIX to transfer information through C3M to PC Coal Lab, run PC Coal Lab with the input data from MFIX, send kinetic information back to C3M in a form that allows C3M to update and continue the MFIX simulation using updated parameters from PC Coal Lab.