An Oxy-Hydrocarbon Model of Fossil Fuels

This paper asserts a new method of analyzing fossil fuels, useful for sorting coals into well defined categories and for the identification of outlying ultimate analysis data. It describes a series of techniques starting with a new multi-variant approach for describing the lower Ranks of coal, progressing to a classical, but modified, single-variant approach for the volatile and high energy Ranks. In addition, for a few special cases, multiple low and high Ranks are also well described by the multi-variant approach. As useful as these techniques are for analyzing fuel chemistry in the laboratory arena, this work was initiated in support of Exergetic Systems’ Input/Loss Method. At commercial coal-fired power plants, Input/Loss allows the determination of fuel chemistry based on combustion effluents. The methods presented allow equations to be developed independent of combustion stoichiometrics, which improve Input/Loss accuracy in determining fuel chemistry on-line and in real time.