Experimental analysis and performance of refinery fuel gas on lean and rich fuel–air premixed combustion

Abstract

Refinery fuel gas (RFG) is a blend of gas streams produced as by-products in various refinery processes. Large amounts of RFG are burning around the clock in the air with thermal energy waste and adverse effects on the environment. The present work investigates experimentally the performance of different compositions of RFG from lean to rich fuel–air premixed combustion, with focus on an efficient and low-emission combustion for its heat recovery. Radiant and porous media burners are the combustion technologies used. For the radiant burner, fuel compositions are propane and ethane with an average ethane ratio of 5%, 10%, and 15% (E05, E10, E15 respectively), which are contrasted with pure propane and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). The pure gases fluxes are fixed as 1 and 2 m3/h for low and high flame configurations, respectively. The lean fuel–air flames investigated are stable for all ethane ratios with low carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrate oxides (NOx) emissions. Maximum temperature is given by pure propane flame (besides LPG), followed by E05, E10 and E15, for both flame configurations. Then, the radiation heat flux of ethane mixtures exhibits a reduction in comparison with LPG. For the porous media burner, lean and rich fuel–air mixture composed by natural gas (NG, 97% methane) and representative flue samples of 55% (C1) and 70% (C2) methane concentration are tested. The C1 and C2 flue samples present high combustion temperatures, showing a positive swap from NG. The NG rich-fuel combustion exposes high hydrogen conversion (27%) at high equivalence ratio (ϕ=1.8). Finally, for both burners lean fuel–air premixed combustion shows high combustion efficiencies, 74.8% with E05 and 80.7% with C1 flue sample.