Experimental and Numerical Investigation of a Large Cylindrical Oil-Fired Combustor

The present work presents measurements of velocity, temperature and heat transfer rates carried out on a segmented water-cooled cylindrical oil-fired flame tube typical of a 0.56 kg/s packaged fire-tube steam boiler. A prediction procedure, that solves the conservation equations of the various entities, was successfully used to produce computed velocities, temperatures and heat flux distributions. A two-equation turbulence model, a combustion model and a discrete ordinate radiation model were used to approximate the various characteristics of the flow. The combustion model solved the Eulerian equations of the gas phase, and the Lagrangian equations of the droplet motion, heating, evaporation and combustion.