Abstract
The overall efficiency of a regenerative chamber for a glass furnace mainly relies on the thermo-fluid dynamics of air and waste gas alternatively flowing through stacks of refractory bricks (checkers) determining the heat recovery. A numerical approach could effectively support the design strategies in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the current technology and hopefully suggest new perspectives of improvement. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) scheme for the regenerator is proposed, where the real geometry of the solid phase is modelled as a porous solid phase exchanging heat with the gas stream. Satisfactory data fitting proved the reliability of the present approach, whose applications are proposed in the last section of this study, to confirm how such a CFD modelling could be helpful in improving the overall energy efficiency of the regeneration chamber.
Highlights
In the whole of the process industry, attention is focused towards prevention by inherent safer features and rethinking the processes: these trends do not hold only for safety, health, and environmental protection, but for product quality, energy management, and process operability [1]
The calculations were performed by the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code ANSYS-Fluent® (ANSYS Inc., Canonsburg, PA, USA) over the whole chamber domain, for both air and waste gas cycles
We developed the regenerator model of ANSYS-Fluent® as it had been successfully adopted to evaluate the performance of new cruciform refractory solution in a glass furnace, at an affordable computational cost [2]
Summary
In the whole of the process industry, attention is focused towards prevention by inherent safer features and rethinking the processes: these trends do not hold only for safety, health, and environmental protection, but for product quality, energy management, and process operability [1] On this basis, quality standards and process efficiency must be fulfilled at the same time in glass production, despite the fact that this industrial sector is traditionally quite conservative towards innovation or experimentation. A numerical approach can be helpful in predicting the yield of the aforementioned processes, in delivering guidelines for an environmentally sounder glass industry and in assessing the validity of innovative solutions Such a technique proves to be successful in matching the operating regimes of glass furnaces with those pertaining to other plant units downstream.
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