Numerical Analysis of the Effects of Oxygen-Enriched and Different Inlet Conditions on Performance of an Indirect Reheating Furnace with Pulse Combustion

Abstract

The requirement of improving efficiency and performance leads to the continuous development of furnaces and burners. For this purpose, it is necessary to establish a model suitable for industrial production and adjust it according to industrial demand. In this paper, a comprehensive numerical model is developed to characterize the combustion, heat transfer, and slab heating in an indirect reheating furnace with pulse combustion. To realize the pulse combustion process, a pulse control approach based on a user-defined function (UDF) was proposed to control the radiant tube burner state. Indirect heat transfer in the furnace was realized by coupling the radiant tubes and the furnace as a whole. In a simulation with the eddy dissipation concept (EDC) model, results from the four-step mechanism were in close accordance with those of the GRI 3.0 mechanism, and both mechanisms could describe the combustion process in detail. However, the calculation time of the EDC model with the four-step mechanism was reduced significantly. Thus, the EDC model with the four-step mechanism was selected as the ideal combustion model used for further simulation research. Through experimental validation, the simulation results of the developed model using the EDC model with the four-step mechanism showed a good agreement with the experimental results. Additionally, with this model, the effects of oxygen-enriched combustion with 74 vol % N2 and 26 vol % O2 in the oxidizer and inlet-change case with a fuel inlet and a primary air inlet on the performance of an indirect reheating furnace with pulse combustion were specially studied. The maximum flame temperature and the average temperature of the furnace atmosphere increased from 2046 to 2175 K and from 1241 to 1279 K for increased oxygen concentration, respectively. Compared with air-fuel combustion, the discharging slab temperature reached a growth of 2.9% in oxygen-enriched combustion. After changing the inlet boundary of the radiant tube burners, since the excessive combustion in the burner’s combustion chamber was avoided and the full combustion of fuel in the radiant tubes was promoted, the flame intensity in the radiant tubes was enhanced and the maximum flame temperature reached 2196 K. At the same time, the mole fraction of CO at the outlet became smaller and the slab temperature in all zones of the furnace increased by more than 3.5%. This study showed that higher efficiency of an indirect reheating furnace with pulse combustion can be achieved by oxygen-enriched combustion and changing the inlet boundary of the burners.