High-Resolution Simulations of Coal Injection in A Gasifier

Abstract

This study demonstrates an approach to effectively combine high- and low-resolution simulations for design studies of industrial coal gasifier. The flow-field data from a 10 million cell full-scale simulation of a commercial-scale gasifier were used to construct a reduced configuration to economically study the coal injection in detail. High-resolution numerical simulations of the coal injection were performed using the open-source code MFIX running on a high performance computing system. Effects of grid resolution and numerical discretization scheme on the predicted behavior of coal injection and gasification kinetics were analyzed. Pronounced differences were predicted in the devolatilization and steam gasification rates because of different discretization schemes, implying that a high-order numerical scheme is required to predict well the unsteady gasification process on an adequately resolved grid. Computational costs for simulations of varying resolutions are presented to illustrate the trade-off between the accuracy of solution and the time-to-solution, an important consideration when engineering simulations are used for the design of commercial-scale units.