Transient simulation of biomass combustion in a circulating fluidized bed riser

Interest in circulating fluidized bed (CFB) boilers as a power generation technology has sky-rocketed in recent years because of several advantages this technology offers over conventional boilers, such as increased gas-solid mixing, which results in higher combustion efficiency and the ability to use lower rank fuels. CFB combustors are operated at lower temperatures than conventional thermal power generation combustors, thus reducing NOx emissions, while SO2 emissions can be conveniently controlled through the addition of Ca-based sulfur sorbents within the combustor.This paper summarizes the modeling effort on a 50 kWth CFB combustor designed, built, and operated at CanmetENERGY in Ottawa, Canada. The numerical model employs the multiphase particle-in-cell (PIC) approach in the open-source Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges (MFiX) Software Suite. The MFiX-PIC model parameters for the simulation are tuned against cold-flow experiments from CanmetENERGY using olivine sand as the inert bed material. It is shown that for the relatively coarse fluid meshes and large parcel sizes necessitated by the scale of the simulation, filter size dependent corrections to the drag law must be incorporated to ensure accuracy of the simulation results. The validated cold flow model is extended to simulate reacting flow with torrefied hardwood as the feedstock and to validate the combustion reaction scheme.The species concentrations at the riser outlet are compared against CanmetENERGY's experiments and show satisfactory agreement. The simulations demonstrate the ability of MFiX-PIC to accurately capture both the physics and chemistry of a CFB combustor at bench scales, which can be further extended to pilot-and industrial-scale systems.