(53as) Studying Radiative Heat Transfer Using Computational Fluid Dynamics Under Oxy-Combustion Environments of Coal and Biomass Blends

Oxy-fuel combustion technology is increasingly being considered as one of the main technologies to aid in carbon capture and storage. As a result, there have been several experimental and numerical studies on oxy-fuel combustion of various gaseous and solid fuels. However, most of these studies have focused on flame dynamics and/or emission characteristics under oxy-fuel conditions and very few studies have looked at the effects of oxy-fuel firing on heat transfer characteristics in systems. Studying the heat transfer characteristics is important as most practical furnaces will most likely be retro-fitted so that they can operate on both oxy-fuel as well as air-fired modes depending on system requirements. It is thus important for manufactures to ensure that the radiative and convective heat transfer patterns meet system performance requirements under both sets of conditions.

Radiative heat transfer measurements made in a 0.5 MW combustion test facility at RWE nPower [1] during the combustion of co-fired coal-biomass blends under oxy-fired conditions is modeled using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The CFD modeling is carried out using the commercial software package STAR-CCM+ [2], where wall incident radiative flux measurements at different locations along the furnace are compared between experimental data and simulations and reported. This study highlights the effect of particle radiative properties and their influence on the incident radiative flux for a given set of firing conditions.