Modelling Radiative Heat Transfer in Oxycoal Combustion

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is essential to mitigate the impact of energy production from fossil fuels on the environment. Oxyfuel technology is a process developed to reduce emissions from power stations by removing nitrogen from air and burning the fossil fuels in a stream of pure oxygen. The remaining oxidiser is composed of recycled flue gas from the furnace to reduce temperatures. The product of this system is a flue gas with very high carbon dioxide concentration enabling more efficient capture and storage. Accurate modelling of oxyfuel is essential to gain better understanding of the combustion fundamentals and obtain accurate predictions of properties within the furnace that cannot be measured. Heat transfer to the furnace walls will be affected due to the different composition of the gases in the furnace. Carbon dioxide has higher heat capacity than nitrogen. Water vapour and carbon dioxide also exhibit absorption spectra of radiation in the infra-red region of the spectrum relating to wavelengths observed in combustion. Accurate CFD modelling of radiative heat transfer in oxyfuel combustion will require improvements to the radiative properties model to account for the spectral nature of radiation. In addition the impact of the solid fuel particles, soot and ash are considered. Several different radiative properties models have been tested to assess the impact on the predicted radiation and temperatures under air and oxy firing conditions. The results for radiation transferred to the walls are highly dependent upon the model chosen and the need for an accurate radiative properties model for oxyfuel firing, such as the full-spectrum k-distribution method is demonstrated.