High temperature air combustion (HiTAC): How it all started for applications in industrial furnaces and future prospects

Abstract

Over the last three decades, High Temperature Air Combustion (HiTAC) has contributed much to become the leading technology for fossil fuel conversion in industrial furnaces. Since then several other researchers have termed it MILD, Flameless or Distributed combustion and they all show much similarities with the HiTAC. This review underlines that the technology was developed through a cooperation between the Japanese government (NEDO, METI) and Nippon Furnace Kogyo (Japan) as well as the key role played by the University of Maryland (USA) and the International Flame Research Foundation (IFRF – the Netherlands). Tokyo Gas (Japan) also provided an important role, although indirect, in the development. The HiTAC technology development was revolutionary with simultaneous demonstration on significant energy savings (some 25%), reduced equipment size, much reduced pollution (50%, including CO2), and noise in industrial furnaces. The technology is now widely used in many modern industrial furnaces worldwide. Per METI some 39,000 HiTAC burners in 7867 industrial furnaces were installed worldwide that showed fuel savings of 1721 billion liters of crude oil/year. It is estimated that 68 Billion liters/year of fuel oil savings and 180 Billion tons/year of CO2 reduction will be realized by 2030 through the use of HiTAC technology in industrial furnaces. This revolutionary technology continues to be adapted by many countries worldwide. The authors provide a brief review on the HiTAC technology development and give their views on its potential applications on the horizon that will also contribute to cleaner and efficient combustion in many other applications, besides industrial furnaces. These include high intensity gas turbine combustion, portable power, and engines. We do not discuss MILD and Flameless combustion as they have been reviewed previously with proliferation of numerous scientific publications available in the literature on the subject.