Numerical simulation of pulverized coal MILD combustion using a new heterogeneous combustion submodel

The scope of this investigation is the application and analysis of a recently developed submodel (Schulze et al., Oil Gas Science Technol, 2013, doi:10.2516/ogst/2012069) for char particle combustion and gasification. The distinguishing feature of this model is a detailed representation of the diffusion and convection processes as well as the homogeneous reactions in the boundary layer around the char particle. These processes are fully coupled to the heterogeneous particle kinetics. The model was implemented into the CFD code ANSYS-Fluent. The coupled solver is used for simulating the IFRF full scale pulverized coal combustion MILD furnace, for which detailed experimental data are available for model evaluation (Orsino et al., IFRF Doc. No F46/y/3, 2000) The new model yields improved agreement with measured data as compared to the standard modeling approach. This can be directly related to the prediction of the char burnout rate. For further analysis, the mixing field in the IFRF furnace is investigated in detail by introducing four mixture fractions for pyrolysis products, char burn-off gases, primary and secondary air, respectively. The solutions of the respective transport equations are used to define the local stoichiometry both in the gas phase and on the particle surface in such a multi-stream system. The conditions in the particle surrounding gas phase as well as on the particle surface are used to define the regime of particle-gas interaction based on the simulations with the new submodel. It can be shown that for certain conditions the homogeneous reactions in the particle boundary must be accounted for.