Computational study on the blended fuel combustion in an industrial tangentially fired boiler

Coal is India’s primary energy source, with Pulverized Coal-Fired Boilers (PCFB) contributing to 40% of global electricity production (Why Is Coal Power Still Relevant for India’s Energy Security?, 2024). Enhancing boiler performance is essential to meet growing power demands. This involves improving parameters like particle size, airflow rate, coal properties, and burner configurations. Developing a reliable CFD methodology is key to accurately simulating the behavior of coal and biomass-fired boilers. A novel CFD methodology that includes an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach for simulating coal particle and air movement, along with heat and mass transfer. Combustion and radiative heat transfer are analyzed using the Eddy-Breakup and Discrete Ordinates models. The adopted CFD methodology has been validated with the real-time data of Aditya Aluminum, Sambalpur followed by the grid independence study. Further, the methodology is extended toward blending biomass (sugarcane bagasse) with coal. Three cases were examined with different proportions of coal and biomass, such as case 1: 20% biomass and 80% coal; case 2: 25% biomass and 75% coal; and case 3: 40% biomass and 60% coal. We compared all simulation results with 100% pure coal combustion. Case 1 and 100% pure coal combustion show similar outcome trend. It is advised to use 20 % biomass with coal in industries to save coal consumption.