Modelling Radiative Heat Transfer in Oxycoal Combustion

Author(s):  
Rachael Porter ◽  
Mohamed Pourkashanian ◽  
Alan Williams ◽  
David Smith

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is essential to mitigate the impact of energy production from fossil fuels on the environment. Oxyfuel technology is a process developed to reduce emissions from power stations by removing nitrogen from air and burning the fossil fuels in a stream of pure oxygen. The remaining oxidiser is composed of recycled flue gas from the furnace to reduce temperatures. The product of this system is a flue gas with very high carbon dioxide concentration enabling more efficient capture and storage. Accurate modelling of oxyfuel is essential to gain better understanding of the combustion fundamentals and obtain accurate predictions of properties within the furnace that cannot be measured. Heat transfer to the furnace walls will be affected due to the different composition of the gases in the furnace. Carbon dioxide has higher heat capacity than nitrogen. Water vapour and carbon dioxide also exhibit absorption spectra of radiation in the infra-red region of the spectrum relating to wavelengths observed in combustion. Accurate CFD modelling of radiative heat transfer in oxyfuel combustion will require improvements to the radiative properties model to account for the spectral nature of radiation. In addition the impact of the solid fuel particles, soot and ash are considered. Several different radiative properties models have been tested to assess the impact on the predicted radiation and temperatures under air and oxy firing conditions. The results for radiation transferred to the walls are highly dependent upon the model chosen and the need for an accurate radiative properties model for oxyfuel firing, such as the full-spectrum k-distribution method is demonstrated.

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rydge B. Mulford ◽  
Vivek H. Dwivedi ◽  
Matthew R. Jones ◽  
Brian D. Iverson

Origami tessellations have been proposed as a mechanism for control of radiative heat transfer through the use of the cavity effect. This work explores the impact of a changing projected surface area and varying apparent radiative properties on the net radiative heat transfer of an accordion fold comprised of V-grooves. The net radiative heat transfer of an accordion tessellation is obtained by a thermal energy balance at the cavity openings with radiative properties of the cavities given as a function of various cavity parameters. Results of the analytical model are experimentally confirmed. An accordion tessellation, constructed of stainless-steel shim stock, is positioned to achieve a specified fold angle and placed in a vacuum environment while heated by Joule heating. A thermal camera records the apparent temperature of the cavity openings for various fold angles. Results are compared to apparent temperatures predicted with the analytical model. Analytically and experimentally obtained temperatures agree within 5% and all measurements fall within experimental uncertainty. For diffusely irradiated surfaces, the decrease in projected surface area dominates, causing a continuous decrease in net radiative heat transfer for a collapsing accordion fold. Highly reflective specular surfaces exposed to diffuse irradiation experience large turn-down ratios (7.5× reduction in heat transfer) in the small angle ranges. Specular surfaces exposed to collimated irradiation achieve a turn down ratio of 3.35 between V-groove angles of 120 deg and 150 deg. The approach outlined here may be extended to modeling the net radiative heat transfer for other origami tessellations.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gautham Krishnamoorthy ◽  
Caitlyn Wolf

This study assesses the required fidelities in modeling particle radiative properties and particle size distributions (PSDs) of combusting particles in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) investigations of radiative heat transfer during oxy-combustion of coal and biomass blends. Simulations of air and oxy-combustion of coal/biomass blends in a 0.5 MW combustion test facility were carried out and compared against recent measurements of incident radiative fluxes. The prediction variations to the combusting particle radiative properties, particle swelling during devolatilization, scattering phase function, biomass devolatilization models, and the resolution (diameter intervals) employed in the fuel PSD were assessed. While the wall incident radiative flux predictions compared reasonably well with the experimental measurements, accounting for the variations in the fuel, char and ash radiative properties were deemed to be important as they strongly influenced the incident radiative fluxes and the temperature predictions in these strongly radiating flames. In addition, particle swelling and the diameter intervals also influenced the incident radiative fluxes primarily by impacting the particle extinction coefficients. This study highlights the necessity for careful selection of particle radiative property, and diameter interval parameters and the need for fuel fragmentation models to adequately predict the fly ash PSD in CFD simulations of coal/biomass combustion.


Author(s):  
David L. Damm ◽  
Andrei G. Fedorov

Thermo-mechanical failure of components in planar-type solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) depends strongly on the local temperature gradients at the interfaces of different materials. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to accurately predict the temperature fields within the stack, especially near the interfaces. Because of elevated operating temperatures (of the order of 1000 K or even higher), radiation heat transfer could become a dominant mode of heat transfer in the SOFCs. In this study, we extend our recent work on radiative effects in solid oxide fuel cells (Journal of Power Sources, Vol. 124, No. 2, pp. 453–458) by accounting for the spectral dependence of the radiative properties of the electrolyte material. The measurements of spectral radiative properties of the polycrystalline yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) electrolyte we performed indicate that an optically thin approximation can be used for treatment of radiative heat transfer. To this end, the Schuster-Schwartzchild two-flux approximation is used to solve the radiative transfer equation (RTE) for the spectral radiative heat flux, which is then integrated over the entire spectrum using an N-band approximation to obtain the total heat flux due to thermal radiation. The divergence of the total radiative heat flux is then incorporated as a heat sink into a 3-D thermo-fluid model of a SOFC through the user-defined function utility in the commercial FLUENT CFD software. The results of sample calculations are reported and compared against the baseline cases when no radiation effects are included and when the spectrally gray approximation is used for treatment of radiative heat transfer.


Author(s):  
Kevin Torres Monclard ◽  
Olivier Gicquel ◽  
Ronan Vicquelin

Abstract The effect of soot radiation modeling, pressure, and level of soot volume fraction are investigated in two ethylene-air turbulent flames: a jet flame at atmospheric pressure studied at Sandia, and a confined pressurized flame studied at DLR. Both cases have previously been computed with large-eddy simulations coupled with thermal radiation. The present study aims at determining and analyzing the thermal radiation field for different models from these numerical results. A Monte-Carlo solver based on the Emission Reciprocity Method is used to solve the radiative transfer equation with detailed gas and soot properties in both configurations. The participating gases properties are described by an accurate narrowband ck model. Emission, absorption, and scattering from soot particles are accounted for. Two formulations of the soot refractive index are considered: a constant value and a wavelength formulation dependency. This is combined with different models for soot radiative properties: gray, Rayleigh theory, Rayleigh-Debye-Gans theory for fractal aggregates. The effects of soot radiative scattering is often neglected since their contribution is expected to be small. This contribution is determined quantitatively in different scenarios, showing great sensitivity to the soot particles morphology. For the same soot volume fraction, scattering from larger aggregates is found to modify the radiative heat transfer noticeably. Such a finding outlines the need for detailed information on soot particles. Finally, the role of soot volume fraction and pressure on radiative interactions between both solid and gaseous phases is investigated.


2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 258-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Damm ◽  
Andrei G. Fedorov

Thermo-mechanical failure of components in planar-type solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) depends strongly on the local temperature gradients at the interfaces of different materials. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to accurately predict the temperature fields within the stack, especially near the interfaces. Because of elevated operating temperatures (of the order of 1000K or even higher), radiation heat transfer could become a dominant mode of heat transfer in the SOFCs. In this study, we extend our recent work on radiative effects in solid oxide fuel cells [J. Power Sources, 124, No. 2, pp. 453–458] by accounting for the spectral dependence of the radiative properties of the electrolyte material. The measurements of spectral radiative properties of the polycrystalline yttria-stabilized zirconia electrolyte we performed indicate that an optically thin approximation can be used for treatment of radiative heat transfer. To this end, the Schuster–Schwartzchild two-flux approximation is used to solve the radiative transfer equation for the spectral radiative heat flux, which is then integrated over the entire spectrum using an N-band approximation to obtain the total heat flux due to thermal radiation. The divergence of the total radiative heat flux is then incorporated as a heat sink into a three-dimensional thermo-fluid model of a SOFC through the user-defined function utility in the commercial FLUENT computational fluid dynamics software. The results of sample calculations are reported and compared against the base line cases when no radiation effects are included and when the spectrally gray approximation is used for treatment of radiative heat transfer.


2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojing Sun ◽  
Philip J. Smith

Accurate prediction of radiative heat transfer plays a key role in many high temperature applications, such as combustion devices and fires. Among various simulation methods, the Monte-Carlo Ray-Tracing (MCRT) has the advantage of solving the radiative transfer equation (RTE) for real gas mixtures with almost no approximations; however, it has disadvantage of requiring a large computational effort. The MCRT method can be carried out with either the Forward MCRT or the Reverse MCRT, depending on the direction of ray tracing. The RMCRT method has advantages over the FMCRT method in that it uses less memory, and in a domain decomposition parallelization strategy, it can explicitly obtain solutions for the domain of interest without the need for the solution on the entire domain.


2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liangyu Wang ◽  
Michael F. Modest

The multi-scale full-spectrum k-distribution (MSFSK) method has become a promising method for radiative heat transfer in inhomogeneous media. In this paper an original distribution scheme is proposed to extend the MSFSK’s ability in dealing with boundary wall emission. This scheme pursues the overlap concept of the MSFSK method and requires no changes in the original MSFSK formulation. A boundary emission overlap coefficient is introduced and two approaches of evaluating the coefficient are outlined. The distribution scheme is evaluated and the two approaches are compared by conducting sample calculations for radiative heat transfer in strongly inhomogeneous media using both the MSFSK method and the line-by-line method.


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