Thermal radiation is the dominating form of heat transfer in several combustion technologies that combust solid fuels, such as pulverized coal combustion and fixed bed combustion. The thermal radiation originates from the hot combustion gases and particles. For accurate modelling of thermal radiation in these environments the selection of the radiative transport model and radiative property model is important. Radiative property models for gases have received huge attention and several well documented models exist. For particles, soot has received considerable attention whereas other particles have not to a similar extent. The Planck mean coefficients are most commonly used to describe the radiative properties of the particles. For gases the Planck mean absorption coefficient is known to give large deviations from recognised exact models in predicting the radiative heat transfer. In this study the use of Planck mean coefficients for particles are investigated and compared to spectral models. Two particle mass size distributions of fly ash are used, representing biomass and coal combustion. The evaluation is conducted in several combustion-like test cases with both gases and particles. The evaluation shows that using Planck mean coefficients for particles, in combustion-like situations, can give large errors in predicting the radiative heat flux and especially the source term. A new weighted sum of grey gas approach is tested and evaluated. It includes both the particles and gases to better account for the non-greyness of the fly ash absorption coefficient.

No abstract

No abstract

This parametric study shows that thermal radiation from particles, fly ash and char, can be highly relevant for estimating the radiative heat flux to surfaces in grate fired furnaces, especially to the hot bed. The large effects of particle radiative heat transfer come from cases with municipal solid waste (MSW) as fuel whereas biomass cases have moderate effect on the overall radiative heat transfer. The parameters investigated in the study were the fuel parameters, representing a variety of particle loads and size distributions, emissivities of walls and bed, and the size of furnace. The investigations were conducted in a 3-D rectangular environment with a fixed temperature field, and homogeneous distribution of gases and particles. The choice of boundary emissivity was found to be much more or equally important as the particle radiation effects, dependent if biomass or MSW, respectively, was used as the fuel. The effect of particle radiation increased with increasing furnace size, mostly evident in the change of the radiative source term and the heat flux to the bed. Compared to previous studies of particle radiation in grate fired combustion, this study used realistic particle mass size distributions for fly ash. Estimates of char mass size distributions inside the furnace were conducted and used.