A numerical investigation of combustion parameters in various industrial furnaces

Abstract

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, developed at Argonne national laboratory to simulate turbulent mixing, combustion reaction, radiation heat transfer, and pollutant kinetics of combustion flow, has been used to study various melting furnaces. The code employs an integral approach to incorporate a lumped combustion reaction model in the flow calculation and a separate hybrid technique to perform pollutant kinetics calculations. The CFD code has been validated with experimental data collected from industrial furnaces and then used for a parametric study of various furnace geometries and operation conditions. The furnace configuration greatly effected the flow property distribution as well as the combustion efficiency. The air injection velocity effected the flow penetration and the species mixing. The injection angle also significantly effected the species mixing. And finally, the equivalence ratio effected the temperature and pollutant concentrations. The study demonstrates that CFD can be a useful tool for analyzing the flow field of the combustion space in industrial furnaces.