Leading on from the recent publication of the reports on solid fuel characterisation methodologies and analysis, the IFRF has pleasure in announcing the availability of the full suite of data obtained from its Isothermal Plug Flow Reactor.

Available in electronic format and known as the Solid Fuel Database, the information reflects a three year project to collect and organize all past IPFR data.  The basic fuel properties are also summarized. 

The SFDB covers devolatilisation, char combustion and fuel nitrogen release data of more than 200 different solid fuels, both parent and char materials, with complementary information about fuels properties (ultimate, proximate analysis, ash composition, fusion temperatures, etc.), experiments conditions, rig descriptions and characterization procedures.

Access to the database is available through a guest account (user name: guest, password: guest) which enables a brief look at the database structure and content.  More comprehensive access is possible via an SFDB Member account, which can be obtained by contacting Leo Tognotti from within the the SFDB Forum.  Registered users will be able to view data such as kinetic parameters, and may also have printing and export options.

Parties willing to participate in further SFDB development, or who own good pulverized fuel characterization data and wish to share it with the combustion community are kindly requested to contact either Leo Tognotti or Jarek Hercog – once again via the SFDB Forum.

It is planned that in future iterations, the SFDB data will be further processed and analysed to achieve normalization and evaluation of missing parameters by using well established correlations, and derivation of kinetic parameters from raw data.

To exemplify how the SFDB can be used for obtaining kinetics for comprehensive CFD modelling of pulverized fuel combustion, the paper  Multivariable optimization of reaction order and kinetic parameters for high temperature oxidation of ten bituminous coal chars, published recently in  Combustion and Flame by Oskar Karlström et Al. (Combust. Flame (2011), doi:10.1016/j.combustflame.2011.03.003),  has also been published today on the IFRF website.

The study, thanks to a collaboration between Abo Akademi (Finland) and IFRF, developed a systematic approach in getting apparent reaction orders for ten bituminous coal chars at three different oxygen concentrations, ranging from 4-12 vol%, and a gas temperature of 1223 K for each char, experimental runs taken from the IFRF SFDB.  For various reaction orders between 0.05 and 2.00, kinetic parameters were independently determined and the resulting values were incorporated into an empirical power law model and compared to experimental data for the ten chars, over a burnout range of 0-75%.  The best fit to the experiments occurs with apparent reaction orders of around 1 for all the chars.

For more insights into solid fuel combustion and the use of the SFDB, additional reports with new data sets, including oxy-coal conditions, will be published on the IFRF website, and recent papers and publications will be cited and made available.  Priority alerts will appear on the SFDB Forum which will continue to be used to facilitate open discussion amongst SFDB users.