Radiation Turbulence Chemistry Interaction

The design of gasifiers and their operation has largely been an experience based enterprise. The gasification models developed over the years have not been robust enough to apply to a wide range of operating conditions, gasifier geometries and feedstocks. The primary reason behind this shortcoming is the failure to incorporate detailed physics and chemistry of all the coupled non-linear phonemena occuring during solid fuel gasification. Gasification inherently involves a complicated, non-linear coupling of various physical/chemical phenomena including devolatilization, swirl-induced turbulent mixing, homogeneous/heterogeneous combustion, radiative/convective heat transport, slag formation etc. Before we aim to accurately predict overall metrics of gasifier performance like fuel conversion and syngas composition, we need to build a satisfactory level of confidence in the sub-models of the various physical processes in the gasifier. In this work, we build, refine and validate the various submodels involved in the multiscale CFD modeling of entrained flow gasification.