Effect of Chemical Reaction Mechanisms and NOx Modeling on Air-Fired and Oxy-Fuel Combustion of Lignite in a 100-kW Furnace

In the present paper, a three-dimensional numerical investigation of pulverized dry lignite was undertaken, integrating the combustion of four different scenarios adopted experimentally in a 100-kW Chalmers laboratory-scale furnace. A hybrid unstructured grid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code was used to model and analyze: an air-fired, oxy-fuel OF25 (25 vol % O 2 concentration), oxy-fuel OF27 (27 vol % O 2 concentration), and oxy-fuel OF29 (29 vol % O 2 concentration). The appropriate mathematical models with the related kinetics parameters were implemented to calculate the temperature distributions, species concentrations (O 2, CO 2, CO, H 2 O, and H 2 ), NO x emission concentrations, and the radiation heat transfer. The multistep chemical reaction mechanisms were conducted on the gas phase and solid phase of coal reaction in one-, two-, and three-step reaction schemes. The predicted results showed reasonably good agreement against the measured data for all combustion cases; however, in the three-step scheme, the results were highly improved, particularly in the flame envelope zone. For the NO x calculations, the obvious differences between the air-fired and oxy-fuel (OF27 and OF29) cases were evident. In the OF27 and OF29 cases, the expected increase in the flame temperatures and CO 2 and H 2 O concentrations led to a slight increase in the radiative heat fluxes on the furnace wall, with respect to the air-fired case. As a continuation of improvement to the oxy-fuel combustion model, this numerical investigation might probably provide important information toward future modeling of a 550-MW, large-scale, brown coal oxyfuel tangentially fired furnace.