With increasing use of biomass in combustion processes, the reduction of the related NO
x
emissions which originate mainly from the fuel nitrogen becomes more and more important.
Efficient primary measures for NO
x
reduction are staged combustion techniques. Air staging
has been investigated earlier and has found its way into practice. Since fuel staging has not
been applied with nonpulverized biomass yet, the aim of the present work was to investigate the
potential of fuel staging for NO
x
reduction in fixed bed systems. For this purpose, a prototype
understoker furnace of 75 kW thermal input with two fuel beds in series was developed.
Experiments were performed with wood chips (low nitrogen content) and UF-chipboards (high
nitrogen content) to investigate the influences of the main process parameters, i.e., stoichiometric
ratio, temperatures, residence time, and fuel properties on the conversion of fuel nitrogen to
N-species. The most important parameters were found to be the temperature and the stoichiometric ratio in the reburn zone. The potential of fuel staging was measured and compared with
air staging and unstaged combustion. The experiments show that low NO
x
emissions are already
achievable with fuel staging at lower temperatures than with air staging, i.e., 900−1000 °C, and
at a stoichiometric ratio of 0.85 in the reduction zone. The NO
x
reduction achieved under optimum
conditions for UF-chipboard as main fuel was 78% which is higher than with air staging, where
72% NO
x
reduction was measured. For wood chips both measures attained about 66%. The
nitrogen conversion during air and fuel staging has also been simulated using a furnace model
based on ideal flow patterns as perfectly stirred reactors and plug flow reactors. A detailed reaction
mechanism including the nitrogen chemistry (GRI-Mech 2.11) was implemented. The trends found
with this model are in good agreement with the experiments and they indicate that even higher
NO
x
reduction may be reached with improved process design. The investigations show that fuel
staging is a promising technology for NO
x
reduction also for fixed bed biomass furnaces.