Coal Combustion Science. Quarterly progress report, October--December 1994

The objective of this work is to support the Office of Fossil Energy in executing research on coal combustion science. This project consists of basic research on coal combustion that supports both the Pittsburgh Energy Technology Center (PETC) Direct Utilization Advanced Research and Technology Development Program, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) Coal Combustion Science Project. Specific tasks include: Task 1--Kinetics and mechanisms of pulverized coal char combustion; and Task 2--deposit growth and property development in coal-fired furnaces. The objective of task 1 is to characterize the combustion behavior of selected US coals under conditions relevant to industrial pulverized coal-fired furnaces. Work is being done in four areas: (a) kinetics of heterogeneous fuel particle populations; (b) char combustion kinetics at high carbon conversion; (c) the role of particle structure and the char formation process in combustion and; (d) unification of the Sandia char combustion data base. The objectives of Task 2 are to provide a self-consistent database of simultaneously measured, time-resolved, ash deposit properties in well-controlled and well-defined environments and to provide analytical expressions that relate deposit composition and structure to deposit properties of immediate relevance to PETC`s Combustion 2000 program. The task include the development and use of diagnostics to monitor, in situ and in real time, deposit properties, including information on both the structure and composition of the deposits