Impending regulations of mercury emission from coal-fired utilities are driving current efforts to develop efficient control technologies. This includes a comprehensive field test program that considers full-scale use of mercury control by injection of activated carbon upstream of a particulate collection device (baghouse or ESP). The present effort aims at numerical modeling of the in-flight mercury capture by adsorption using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Such a modeling capability enables optimization of sorbent injection strategies in order to better overcome mass transfer limitations. CFD provides detailed duct-scale information on the flow of flue gases as well as the dispersion of injected sorbent. Sorbent particle trajectories are determined using Lagrangian tracking, while a convective-diffusive transport equation describes the gas-phase mercury distribution. Mercury sink terms are defined based on a particle model for mass transfer and surface adsorption on an entrained sorbent particle. We present simulation results for the sorbent dispersion of large-scale field tests carried out at the Brayton Point power station in Massachusetts.

Volume Subject Area:
Fuels, Combustion, and Emission Issues
Topics:
Computer simulation, Sorbents, Particulate matter, Computational fluid dynamics, Mass transfer, Activated carbon, Coal, Control systems, Ducts, Emissions, Flight, Flow (Dynamics), Flue gases, Modeling, Optimization, Power stations, Public utilities, Regulations, Simulation results
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