Principal Investigator Ahmed Ghoniem
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/rgd/www/oxyFuelCombustion/oxyFuelCombustion.html
Burning in an environment with mixed pure O2 and recirculated flue gas, the oxy-coal combustion shows new flame features such as ignition delay and destabilization because of the unique physical properties of CO2. Fundamentals of oxy-combustion will be studied systematically to understand these new features, and improve the combustion efficiency and environment performance.
A high fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) framework is implemented to study the flame regimes, flow patterns, and radiation heat transfers. Turbulence, radiation, chemistry-turbulence interaction and reaction kinetics will be simulated. Moreover, the coal water slurry atomized droplets fate indicates the importance of sub-models representing char particle size changes during the combustion processes, such as agglomeration, fragmentation and slagging combustion, which will be developed and integrated into the CFD framework.
Advanced designs of the oxy-combustor will be proposed and studied in the future.