Local Furnace Data and Modeling Comparison for a 600-MWe Coal-Fired Utility Boiler

Reductions in furnace exit gas temperature (FEGT) by changing boiler operating variables and/or adding wall soot blowers and/or lowering burner elevations are investigated. Evaluation of these approaches requires experimental furnace testing and computational furnace modeling. The experimental facility is a Combustion Engineering corner-fired pulverized-coal boiler with a capacity of 606 MWe. Local gas temperature distributions, local radiative and total wall heat flux distributions, and stack NOx were measured during constant-load furnace tests under various combinations of burner configuration, burner tilt angles, excess-O2 setpoints and overfire airflow rate. These measurements are used for tuning and calibrating a furnace model based on the PCGC-3 code developed by Brigham Young University. The experimental data gathered in this work comprise a comprehensive set under controlled conditions on a very-large-scale coal-fired plant and provides information for use in comparing the predictions of furnace-design codes.