Numerical investigation for combustion characteristics of vacuum residue (VR) in a test furnace

It has become inevitable to search for alternative fuels due to current worldwide energy crisis. In this paper combustion characteristics of vacuum residue (VR) is investigated numerically against experimental data 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 for pulverized coal. Thermal and fuel NO are predicted by the conditional moment closure (CMC) method for estimation of elementary reaction rates. It turns out that Sauter mean diameter (SMD) of VR droplets is a crucial parameter for better combustion efficiency and lower NO. Reasonable agreement is achieved for spatial distributions of major species, temperature and NO for all test cases with different fuel and steam flow rates.