Today marked the start at Livorno of a two week campaign within the framework of the EU funded RELCOM project.  RELCOM – “Reliable and Efficient Combustion of Oxygen/Coal/Recycled Flue Gas Mixtures” involves a consortium of higher education institutions, research centres and industrial partners in a series of applied research, development and demonstration activities aimed at improving the design and reliability of full-scale early demonstration oxyfuel plant and assessing the associated commercial risks and opportunities.

The task at hand requires that IFRF investigative team undertakes medium scale testing and validation on the Enel 3MW furnace (Fosper) using a scaled version of the IFRF’s Aerodynamic Air Staged Burner (AASB).  The burner will first be tested in cold conditions for aerodynamic characterization, and then combustion tests will be carried out in oxyfuel conditions in order to study the flame produced by different burner configurations.

During the second week of the campaign, the burner will operate in air and in oxy/CO2 modes.  The IFRF team will be joined by RELCOM partners University of South Wales, University of Stuttgart and Technische Universiteit Munchen.  IFRF will provide in-flame measurements using IFRF probes for radiation and thermal characterization of the flames, local NOx concentrations and carbon in ash.  USTUTT will perform measurements with respect to fouling and corrosion including the deposits/material exposure, HCl, S03 and particulate measurements, and TUM will provide spectral heat transfer measurements for validation of the radiation sub models using their modified FTIR equipment.  University of South Wales will test their burner/flame condition monitoring techniques.

In further tasks, the data resulting from this two week campaign will be integrated with the results from earlier pilot scale tests to provide a definition of scale-up criteria for oxy-fuel burners.  These in turn will be benchmarked against previous IFRF oxycoal combustion campaigns conducted on the ENEL 3 MW demonstration rig.

The IFRF data produced will be made available to IFRF Members in the form of a report to be published early next year and will be of particular interest to mathematical modelers.

More information on the topic of Oxycoal combustion research at IFRF is available on the IFRF website.

The proceedings of an IFRF TOTeM on the topic of Oxycoal combustion may be viewed and downloaded by IFRF Members.  The information is also freely available from the dedicated RELCOM website which is managed by IFRF.