Measurements and modeling of pulverized fuel char in an entrained flow reactor

In recent years, the combustion zone of utility boilers were modified for NOx control and this made the task of maintaining low residual carbon levels in boiler fly ash much more difficult. To predict the relationships between boiler operating conditions and residual carbon-in-ash, there is a need for improvements in determining the appropriate char reactivity to use in simulating coal-fired combustors and in relating this reactivity to unburned coal characteristics. To aid in this effort, a tubular, downward-fired, refractory-lined, laminar entrained flow reactor (EFR) was built to provide a pilot scale environment with 2 seconds residence time for studying coal combustion. Using a commercial CFD code (FLUENT), a three dimensional numerical model of coal burning in the EFR was created to evaluate common char burnout kinetic modeling approaches. EFR experimental data was obtained for operating conditions adjusted to reproduce particle Lagrangian temperature and oxygen concentration time histories typically found in coal-fired utility boilers. The radial temperature profiles were measured at different axial locations in the EFR with a suction pyrometer and thermocouples. The temperature distribution in the reactor agreed well with the simulations. A gas analyzer with a quenching probe was used to measure the oxygen distribution to similarly confirm oxygen distribution in the EFR. A semi-isokinetic particulate sampling probe was used to extract ash samples at different heights in the reactor to measure the evolution of loss on ignition (LOI). Measured LOI values were used to validate the model against predicted values. Reaction kinetics rates in the model were adjusted to bring agreement between calculated LOI and the measured values from the experimental results. The LOI predictions by kinetic-diffusion and CBK model are very similar at the late stage of char burnout. The results indicate that we can achieve sufficient accuracy for the prediction of final carbon-in-ash using the much simpler kinetic-diffusion model. The ratio of reaction rates of two coals in the low temperature TGA experiment were compared with the high temperature EFR experiment. The ratio of reaction rate between two coal chars in the TGA experiments was nearly one order of magnitude higher than in the EFR experiments.