The gasification of carbonaceous fuel materials offers significant potential for the production of both energy and chemical products. Advancement of gasification technologies may be expedited through the use of computational fluid dynamics, as virtual reactor design offers a low cost method for system prototyping. To that end, a series of numerical studies were conducted to identify a computational modeling strategy for the simulation of coal gasification in fluidized bed reactors.
The efforts set forth by this work first involved the development of a validatable hydrodynamic modeling strategy for the simulation of sand and coal fluidization. Those fluidization models were then applied to systems at elevated temperatures and polydisperse systems that featured a complex material injection geometry, for which no experimental data exists. A method for establishing similitude between 2-D and 3-D multiphase systems that feature non-symmetric material injection were then delineated and numerically tested.
Following the development of the hydrodynamic modeling strategy, simulations of coal gasification were conducted using three different chemistry models. Simulated results were compared to experimental outcomes in an effort to assess the validity of each gasification chemistry model. The chemistry model that exhibited the highest degree of agreement with the experimental findings was then further analyzed identify areas of potential improvement. / Ph. D. / Efficient utilization of coal is critical to ensuring stable domestic energy supplies while mitigating human impact on climate change. This idea may be realized through the use of gasification systems technologies. The design and planning of next-generation coal gasification reactors can benefit from the use of computational simulations to reduce both development time and cost. This treatise presents several studies where computational fluid dynamics was applied to the problem of coal gasification in a bubbling fluidized bed reactor with focuses on accurate tracking of solid material locations and modeling of chemical reactions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/78733 |
| Date | 24 August 2017 |
| Creators | Soncini, Ryan Michael |
| Contributors | Mechanical Engineering, Battaglia, Francine, Paul, Mark R., Lattimer, Brian Y., Agblevor, Foster A., Klein, Michael T. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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