Energy & Fuels, Vol.27, No.12, 7896-7904, 2013
Computational Fluid Dynamic Simulations of a Pilot-Scale Transport Coal Gasifier: Evaluation of Reaction Kinetics
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory has developed a software platform titled Carbonaceous Chemistry for Computational Modeling (C3M) that can be used to seamlessly connect the reaction kinetics typically found in the gasification process to various computational fluid dynamic (CFD) packages, including MFIX, ANSYS-FLUENT, and BARRACUDA, for advanced gasifier simulation. In this study, a pilot-scale transport gasifier was simulated by employing the C3M platform to incorporate various kinetics into the CFD simulation. It was found that appropriate chemical kinetics for gasification reactions are key to the numerical prediction of syngas composition and the kinetics from Niksa Energy Associate's PC Coal Lab yielded reasonable agreement to the experimental data. Using the C3M platform, different chemistry kinetics for coal devolatilization-generated by METC Gasifier Advanced Simulation (MGAS), Niksa Energy Associate's PC Coal Lab (PCCL), Chemical Percolation Model for Coal Devolatilization (CPD), and Advanced Fuel Research's Functional-Group, Depolymerization, Vaporization, Cross-linking (FG-DVC)-were evaluated for the transport gasifier simulation. Results showed that the effect of devolatilization kinetics on the transport gasifier simulation is considered to be secondary comparing to the char gasification reactions because of the relatively long residence time of coal particles in the system.