View article

One of the most promising technologies for carbon capture and storage (CCS) is oxy-fuel combustion. This study uses a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code to simulate the firing of coal and biomass under air and oxy-fuel conditions in an existing full-scale 500 MW_e coal-fired utility boiler. Results are presented for conventional air–coal combustion that corresponds well against available experimental data and an in-house empirical model. Maintaining the same thermal input and exit oxygen concentration, CFD was used as a predictive tool with standard physical submodels, to examine the effects of firing under air–biomass, oxy-coal and oxy-biomass conditions. The oxy-fuel conditions were investigated at oxygen concentrations of 25% and 30% by volume for a wet flue gas recycle. The effects of firing biomass in both air and oxy-fuel conditions are predicted to have a lower total heat transfer to the …