• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.647-653
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• 2007

The ultimate objective of this study is to develop a reliable oxygen-enriched combustion techniques especially for the case of the flue gas recycling in order to reduce the $CO_2$ emissions from practical industrial boilers. To this end a systematic numerical investigation has been performed, as a first step, for the resolution of the combusting flame characteristics of lab-scale LNG combustor. One of the important parameters considered in this study is the level of flue gas recycling calculated in oxygen enriched environment. As a summary of flame characteristics, for the condition of 100% pure $O_2$ as oxidizer without any flue gas recycling, the flame appears as long and thin laminar-like shape with relatively high flame temperature. The feature of high peak of flame temperature is explained by the absence of dilution and heat loss effects due to the presence of $N_2$ inert gas. The same reasoning is also applicable to the laminarized thin flame one, which is attributed to the decrease of the turbulent mixing. These results are physically acceptable and consistent and further generally in good agreement with experimental results appeared in open literature. As the level of $CO_2$ recycling increases in the mixture of $O_2/CO_2$, the peak flame temperature moves near the burner region due to the enhanced turbulent mixing by the increased amount of flow rate of oxidizer stream. However, as might be expected, the flue gas temperature decreases due to presence of $CO_2$ gas together with the inherent feature of large specific heat of this gas. If the recycling ratio more than 80%, gas temperatures drop so significantly that a steady combustion flame can no longer sustain within the furnace. However, combustion in the condition of 30% $O_2/70% $ $CO_2$ can produce similar gas temperature profiles to those of conventional combustion in air oxidizer. An indepth analyses have been made for the change of flame characteristics in the aspect of turbulent intensity and heat balance.