An extended flamelet/progress variable model for coal/biomass co-firing flame

Abstract

Coal/biomass co-firing (CBCF) is regarded as one of the sustainable alternatives to reduce emissions from the utilization of fossil fuels. It features complex reacting stages and fuel streams caused by the asynchronous reaction behaviors of coal and biomass particles, which cannot be represented well by the traditional two-mixture-fractions (2Z) coal flamelet/progress variable (FPV) model. To address this issue, we developed an extended FPV model for the CBCF flame in the present study. Firstly, a three-dimensional (3D) point-particle direct numerical simulation (PP-DNS) was conducted to explore the combustion characteristics of the co-firing flame and served as a reference for the model development. Secondly, an extended FPV model was developed by introducing an extra parameter to distinguish the volatiles sources, and the model performance was evaluated by the apriori study as well as comparison with those of the traditional coal-/bio- 2Z-FPV models. The results showed that there were three reacting stages with four fuel streams in the CBCF flame, and their corresponding flame behaviors were obviously different from each other as demonstrated in both the one-dimensional flamelets and 3D PP-DNS solutions. The apriori results showed that the coal-/bio- 2Z-FPV models would give large deviations in the predictions of gas temperature and major species due to the lack of distinguishing the volatiles sources. In contrast, the extended FPV model could well reproduce the flame behaviors (both temperature and species profiles) for different reacting stages with complex fuel streams in the CBCF flame. This validated the extended FPV model and demonstrated its superiority against the traditional 2Z-FPV models.