Investigation of steam-air gasification of mechanically activated coal fuel at a setup with thermal capacity of 1 MW

Abstract

Abstract In this work, steam-air gasification of mechanically activated coal was studied experimentally. To increase the energy efficiency of coal flaring, a technology with mechanochemical activation of coal by the mills is being developed at the Institute of Thermophysics SB RAS. The technology is aimed at increasing coal reactivity and can be used to replace high-reactive expensive and difficult-to-obtain fuel oil for ignition and lighting of pulverized coal boilers of thermal power plants (TPP) using mechanically activated microground coal. In experiments, we used brown coal from a deposit in Siberia. The results on the effect of steam flow rate to the continuous gasifier and the point of injection were obtained. During the experiment, the time of autothermal regime stabilization was measured, and it was 105 s. Five different regimes of continuous gasifier operation have been tested. For steam-air gasification with a steam flow rate of 32 kg/h and air excess coefficient of 0.5, concentrations of combustible gases at the end of the continuous gasifier were obtained: H2 (vol.%) = 6.3; CO (vol.%) = 10.7; CH4 (vol.%) = 0.4.