• EDF coal characterisation workshop outputs

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      espadmin

Last week’s Coal Characterisation Workshop formed part of the EDF-IFRF Work-out program “Methodology for the characterisation of pulverized coals: the need, the experimental conditions to obtain reliable data” – which started last year and continued during 2010, with both experimental and model validation activities.

About 25 people attended the meeting, mainly from EDF R&D and IFRF, but other institutions were represented – GRE Laboratory – University of Haute Alsace, France, Abo Akademi, Finland, Doosan Babcock Energy Ltd., UK, Laborelec, Belgium and Cardiff University, UK.

The meeting started with a session on Characterisation of solid fuel for industrial combustion applications where IFRF representatives reviewed the Needs and existing methodologies and reported on the last methodological development and test results obtained in the IFRF Isothermal Plug Flow Reactor on two coals taken as reference in the study.  GRE Laboratory completed the presentation with methodologies on the existence of different causes of uncertainties in conducting Drop Tube Furnace experiments on coals.  On the experimental procedure side, different issues were discussed including the accuracy of the measurements based on ash tracer method, the impact of the presence of O2 on the properties of the produced char during devolatilisation tests, the effect of tar re-condensation on particles, the effect of carrier gas composition (presence of water vapour) on devolatilisation rate and extent, etc.

The presentations which followed focused on the topic Coal combustion kinetics from experimental data, for which Abo Akademi delegates joined the IFRF group.  IFRF presented how to get devolatilisation rates and gas product repartition from experimental characterisation of coal samples, by using different sub-modelling approaches, such as the two parallel reaction model, or more simple (one step) or complex (structural) models.  Abo Akademi presented recent experiences on the methodology for getting high temperature, high heating rate information on char oxidation kinetics, using a kinetic/diffusion limited approach.

Finally EDF R&D and IFRF presented recent results on modeling activities on oxy-coal combustion in industrial systems.

As usual for IFRF events, the presentations and a wrap up report will be published very shortly in the Conferences, Workshops and TOTeMs section of the IFRF website.  Watch MNM for details.