An experimental and numerical study of confined non-reacting and reacting turbulent jets to facilitate homogeneous combustion in industrial furnaces

Confined non-reacting turbulent jets are ideal for recirculating the hot flue gas back into the furnace from an external exhaust duct. Such jets are also used inside the furnace to internally entrain and recirculate the hot flue gas to preheat and dilute the reactants. Both internal and external implementation of confined turbulent jets increase the furnace thermal efficiency. For external implementation, depending on the circumstances, the exhaust gas flow may be co- or counter-flow relative to the jet flow. Inside the furnaces, fuel and air jets are injected separately. To create a condition which can facilitate near homogeneous combustion, these jets have to first mix with the burned gas inside the furnace and simultaneously being heated and diluted prior to combustion. Clearly, the combustion pattern and emissions from reacting confined turbulent jets are affected by jet interactions, mixing and entrainment of hot flue gas. In this work, the flow and mixing characteristics of a non-reacting and reacting confined turbulent jet are investigated experimentally and numerically. This work consists of two parts:;(i) A study of flow and mixing characteristics of non-reacting confined turbulent jets with co- or counter-flowing exhaust/flue gas. Here the axial and radial distributions of temperature, velocity and NO concentration (used as a tracer gas) were measured. FLUENT was used to numerically simulate the experimental results. This work provides the basic understanding of the flow and mixing characteristics of confined turbulent jets and develops some design considerations for recirculating flue gas back into the furnace as expressed by the recirculation zone and the stagnation locations.;(ii) Numerical calculations of near homogeneous combustion are performed for the existing furnace. The exact geometry of the furnace in the lab is used and the real dimensional boundary conditions are considered. The parameters such as air nozzle diameter (dair), fuel nozzle diameter (df), equivalence ratio (&PHgr;), oxygen concentration, gravity, different bottom temperature and separation distance as well as soot radiation that influence the establishment of homogeneous combustion to improve combustion efficiency and reduce pollutant emissions will be numerically studied. These results will help to understand the influence from the selected parameters on the main large scale flow characteristics and provide some insight to the conditions that can facilitate near homogeneous combustion in furnaces.