EXPERIMENTS AND COMPUTATIONAL MODELING OF PULVERIZED-COAL IGNITION

Abstract

Under typical conditions of pulverized-coal combustion, which is characterized by fine particles heated at very high rates, there is currently a lack of certainty regarding the ignition mechanism of bituminous and lower rank coals as well as the ignition rate of reaction. furthermore, there have been no previous studies aimed at examining these factors under various experimental conditions, such as particle size, oxygen concentration, and heating rate. Finally, there is a need to improve current mathematical models of ignition to realistically and accurately depict the particle-to-particle variations that exist within a coal sample. Such a model is needed to extract useful reaction parameters from ignition studies, and to interpret ignition data in a more meaningful way. The authors propose to examine fundamental aspects of coal ignition through (1) experiments to determine the ignition temperature of various coals by direct measurement, and (2) modeling of the ignition process to derive rate constants and to provide a more insightful interpretation of data from ignition experiments. The authors propose to use a novel laser-based ignition experiment to achieve their first objective. Laser-ignition experiments offer the distinct advantage of easy optical access to the particles because of the absence of a furnace or radiating walls, and thus permit direct observation and particle temperature measurement. The ignition temperature of different coals under various experimental conditions can therefore be easily determined by direct measurement using two-color pyrometry. The ignition rate-constants, when the ignition occurs heterogeneously, and the particle heating rates will both be determined from analyses based on these measurements.