Autocatalytic set of chemical reactions of circulating fluidized bed boiler

Abstract

Circulating fluidized bed-boiler (CFB) is considered in some respects to be an improvement over the traditional methods of coal combustion to produce steam for power generation and process or heating purposes. Technical knowledge about the design and operation of circulating fluidized bed-boiler (CFB) is widely available but little has been done in the field of mathematical modeling of combustion in CFBs. Specifically, there is no fundamentally based mathematical model for chemical reactions involved during combustion process in CFBs that has been investigated using graph theory. In this study, several important chemical reactions of combustion process in CFB which considered as significant to the process are identified. Reactant and reactions products are classify as species and the number of species is identified from the reactions. Based on the reactions, the model of chemical reactions during the combustion process for CFB is obtained and represented by G (V, E) where V is a set of nodes which represent species and E is a set of edge which represents catalytic relationship between species. The graph is successfully transformed into its adjacency matrix, A which is non-negative. Analysis of the graph G (V, E) shows that the combustion process of CFB is in accordance to Autocatalytic Set (ACS) theory. The analysis of its adjacency matrix shows that there is a relationship between autocatalytic graph of G (V, E) with Perron-Frobenius theory.