Numerical Investigation for Combustion Characteristics of Vacuum Residue in a Test Furnace

It has become inevitable to search for alternative fuels due to severe energy crisis these days. Use of alternative fuels, which are typically of lower quality, tends to increase environmental pollution, including formation of nitrogen oxides (NOx). In this paper performance of vacuum residue has been investigated experimentally as well as numerically in typical operating conditions of a furnace. Heat release reaction is modeled as sequential steps of devolatilization, simplified gas phase reaction and char oxidation as that for pulverized coal. Thermal and fuel NOx are predicted by conditional estimation of elementary reaction rates and are compared against measured experimental data. On the overall reasonable agreement is achieved for spatial distributions of major species, temperature and NOx for all test cases.