Investigation of multi‐fuel combustion behavior and synergy effect using improved steady‐state discrete particle model simulation

Abstract

SummaryThis paper presents a simulation study of municipal solid waste (MSW) combustion using a multi‐fuel combustion model, which was an extended version from the one previously developed by the authors. The model was a steady‐state model with partial transient implementation as user‐defined functions (UDF) developed in ANSYS Fluent platform to investigate the combustion behavior of fuel interacting in the solid and gas phases. The solid phase was simulated using discrete particle model (DPM). The extended simulation model took into consideration the difference of properties and combustion characteristics of different MSW components. The main improvement was the application of a newly developed algorithm that allows the influence of the surrounding particles and environment on the simulating particle and the possible synergy between them. The combustion and furnace zone of an MSW power plant in Hatyai, Thailand was the simulated case study and the measured temperatures from various sensor locations at the plant exhaust were used for model validation. The inputs for volatile combustion were obtained from pyrolysis experiments. For compatibility with GRI‐Mech 3.0, CH3CHO and C2H2 were used to represent the tar component. In the fuel bed zone, the simulated temperatures were higher than the measured temperatures up to 36%, which were the results of the complete combustion of the simulated fuel bed at too early location on the grate. For the fluid phase, the simulated mean temperature at the locations that were not affected by fuel bed combustion was approximately 6% different from the measured values. Synergy between particles was observed and attributed to the effect of nearby particles' properties on the combustion of simulating particle.

Computational Fluid Dynamics–Discrete Phase Method Simulations in Process Engineering: A Review of Recent Progress

“…It was found that the pyrolysis/gas oxidation reaction has a comprehensive dissipation effect on turbulence. The pyrolysis process is also used as a pre-step of the gasification or combustion processor as the input of volatile gases [103,116].…”