This week a new paper has been published in the IFRF Combustion Journal (http://www.journal.ifrf.net), entitled:

” Waste Incineration; European State of the Art and New Developments”

This paper gives an overview of the state of the art of waste incineration in the European Union countries and puts it in relation to recent emission legislation. The quality and type of waste material and the influence on emissions are also discussed. The effect of improvements to combustion equipment such as tube claddings and control techniques such as fuzzy logic and neural net techniques on incinerator performance is discussed.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Göerner
University of Essen
Institute for Environmental Process Engineering and Plant Design
Leimkugelstr. 10 45141 Essen Germany

ABSTRACT:
In the last decade waste incineration was dominated by environmental requirements and later by economic constraints. Hard legal requirements led to extreme technical solutions especially for the flue gas cleaning to reach very low emission values. Typically these values are lower than for fossil fired plants. 4-staged flue gas cleaning became standard (de-dust, de-SOx and de-HCl, de-NOx and removal of trace elements) and the whole plant became similar to a chemical production plant. The costs for incineration increased continuously and reached values of more than 230 Euro/ton of waste. New legal requirements for landfill in Germany changed this development within the last 5 years. The content of unburned material was to be reduced to 3 or 5 % (depending on the category of the landfill), but with a transition time to 2006. Costs of 20 Euro/ton of waste for landfill changed the whole market and waste incineration plants were forced to look actively for their fuel at a very low price level. Intermediate over-capacities were the consequence which led to a straight forward optimisation of process steps. At the same time the lower calorific value of normal municipal waste increased with the consequence of increasing combustion temperatures and a dramatic increase of problems like corrosion, slagging and fouling in the furnace and in the flue gas pass. Technical answers are water cooled firing grates, modified furnace geometries, optimised secondary air injections and more suitable wall materials like ceramics or cladding of normal boiler steels. All these modifications made mathematical modelling and simulation more attractive even for practical applications. Some examples will demonstrate these new solutions.

For new fields of research the tendencies will be shown. One complex of these is the dust particle behaviour as a function of particle composition and gas species concentrations with respect to slagging, fouling and corrosion behaviour; the other one is the development of new ceramic materials and the application in furnaces.

FULL PAPER:
The full paper may be downloaded from the server, in the “New Papers” section (http://www.journal.ifrf.net/articles.html), by clicking on the Acrobat PDF icon alongside the title.

Publication in the Journal:

The Editor-in-Chief (See associated article in this edition of the MNM) would like to remind all potential authors that publication in the Journal is open to all. If you have interesting results to publish in the field of, or related to, industrial combustion, we invite you to prepare a paper according to the guidelines given in the Author’s Guide on the website (http://www.journal.ifrf.net/).

Papers may be regular “articles” (typically up to 20 pages) or Communications (typically up to 4/5 pages). Review papers can of course be longer. Remember that figures and graphics in general can be in full color. This advantage should be encouraged.

All manuscripts and associated files, proposed for publication should be sent by the Corresponding Author in a compressed/zip file, as an email attachment to journal@ifrf.net. This file should include a statement that the proposal’s content is unpublished material that has not being submitted for publication elsewhere. When an article by the author(s) is cited in the proposed article as “in press”, a copy of this article should accompany the proposed article and should be included in the compressed file.

The Editor-in-Chief looks forward to receiving your proposals.