Numerical simulation of nitric oxide destruction by gaseous fuel reburning in a single-burner furnace

Abstract

A numerical study on nitric oxide (NO) reduction during pulverized coal combustion with reburning technology was presented in this paper. The NO model, including reburning mechanism, was incorporated into a comprehensive coal combustion model for predicting NO reduction in a laboratory-scale single-burner furnace with gaseous fuel reburning. The reburning NO submodel in this study requires the solution of only two transport equations to simulate the complicated physical and chemical processes inherent in the reburning technology. A number of experiments have been previously performed in the single-burner furnace, and the experimental data obtained from the optimized reburn configuration were used to validate the model. Profile comparisons show that the predicted temperature and oxygen concentration match well with the measurements, and the general trend of predicted NO concentration is very similar to that measured. The results of this study show that the present NO model depicts quite well the observed behavior of NO annihilation in the reburning process. It is expected that this usable and computationally economic model represents a useful tool to simulate the gaseous fuel reburning process for the researchers concerned with practical combustors.