Development and testing of a high efficiency advanced coal combustor: Phase 3, Industrial boiler retrofit. Quarterly technical progress report No. 13, October 1, 1994--December 31, 1994

The objective of this project is to retrofit the previously developed High Efficiency Advanced Coal Combustor (HEACC) to a standard gas/oil designed industrial boiler to assess the technical and economic viability of displacing premium fuels with microfine coal. During this reporting period, activities included completing the ``Task 3 Topical Report.`` The report is being reviewed internally by the ABB CE project team. Overall, all the program goals were met except carbon conversion efficiency. Based on all the results obtained to date the ABB CE/Penn State team believes that conducting the 1000 hr demonstration (Task 5) is warranted. Since, Penn State has planned to conduct long term combustion tests on micronized coal and coal-water fuels for other DOE-funded Projects during the first quarter of 1995, the demonstration phase (Task 5) of the subject program is tentatively scheduled to begin in June 1995, pending DOE approval. Work continued under Task 4.0 to complete the ``Commercialization Plan`` with ABB CE`s cognizant Business Unit. To address the lower combustion efficiency than the original project goal (95% vs 98%) during Task 3, the data were evaluated in-detail to understand which of the key parameters might be adjusted to achieve the desired burnout. To identify reasons for this lower combustion efficiency, and to evaluate which of the key parameters (i.e, coal fineness, residence time, coal reactivities etc.) are important for maximizing the combustion efficiency, ABB CE`s proprietary mathematical model known as the Lower Furnace Program-Slice Kinetic Model (LFP-SKM) was used for simulating the combustion process in the Penn State boiler (at full load firing rate). Fuel kinetic information for this study was selected on a surrogate basis from ABB CE`s extensive in-house data base