To accommodate rapidly growing but highly variable renewable power in the grid and large variations in power demand, coal-fired power plants need to be flexibly operated through fast and wide load changes, still with high efficiency and reliability and low emissions. Towards reliable implementation in a power plant under flexible operation, this paper comprehensively investigates the improvement of an industrial low-NOx swirl burner via numerical simulation and various field tests. Burner aerodynamics, which play a vital role in its performance, are largely affected by the burner nozzle structure. For the low-NOx swirl burner under study, the inner secondary air cone structure is found to have the most significant impact on the burner aerodynamics and the combustion performance. For the coal fired in the power plant, the newly designed inner secondary air cone structure, which is a kind of an extended smooth diverging duct, greatly facilitates the entrainment of the primary air into the surrounding swirl secondary air stream and largely enhances lateral mixing. A large recirculation zone is formed between the primary air and the inner secondary air stream, stabilizing ignition and combustion under flexible operation conditions. This is particularly important for low-load operation. Comparatively, reducing the sec-ondary air duct area for a higher axial momentum of the secondary air stream and adding a new particle sep-aration ring for more dispersed particle distribution are found to have a minor impact on the burner aerodynamics. The optimized burner nozzle structure via numerical simulation has been finally adopted by the power plant for the burner retrofit, on which various field tests have been performed on the retrofitted burner. The tests show that the nozzle structure optimization remarkably improves the burner performance, which is also consistent with the numerical prediction. This study also provides useful guidance for optimizing the swirl burners of the similar type.
