Interaction of fuels in co-firing in FBC

More than half of the recent large-scale FBC installations are designed to burn more than one fuel. Especially the use of various biofuels—as such or besides conventional fuels—is becoming more and more common in the new FBC projects. It is a major challenge to be able to understand and predict the behavior of the FBC system when co-firing of different fuels in different proportions. This paper reviews some of the recent research on the fuels interaction in FBC. It is shown that factors such as flue gas emissions, fouling tendency or bed sintering tendency are seldom simple linear functions of the fuel mixture. Rather, non-linear relationships of some kind are much more common. The examples in the paper deal with gaseous emissions in co-firing of wood and coal, and superheater fouling in co-firing of biomass based fuels with very different ashes.