EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF POROUS RADIANT BURNER PERFORMANCE

Gas fired radiant burners are used in a number of manufacturing processes specially that sensitive to the combustion products such as paper drying, paper finishing, powder paint baking and curing, textile drying, and polymer thermal processing. The most important material and forms for porous burners are SiC foams as well as mixer-like structures made of Al2O3 fibers, ZrO2 foams and C/SiC structures. The combustion in porous inert media using mullite 3Al2O3 2SiO2 as a burner material and liquefied petroleum gas LPG as a fuel premixed with air was investigated to show the effect of equivalence ratio and firing rate burner thermal power on the radiation efficiency and surface temperature. Radiation efficiency up to 45 % can be achieved depending on the operating conditions. The burner surface temperatures were recorded under different operating conditions. The results indicated that the burner surface temperature is much lower by more than 300°C than adiabatic flame temperature of LPG for same equivalence ratio which consequently expected to reduce NOx emissions.