Numerical study of a 350 MWe tangentially fired pulverized coal furnace of the As Pontes Power Plant

The aim of this investigation is predicting the flow characteristics with real operating conditions of a boiler to better understand the phenomena occurring in the interior of the furnace and to validate the models chosen for the simulation. For this purpose, we have done a numerical study of the flow of a reactive gas mixture with pulverized coal combustion occurring in a tangentially fired furnace of a real power plant. These calculations were developed with the commercial software ANSYS Fluent. Furthermore, a home-made code was built to perform some necessary preprocessing and postprocessing calculus. In particular, this code solves zero-dimensional balances that have provided a good agreement with the calculated and measured flow at the exit of the furnace and it is also used to validate the convergence of the numerical algorithm for the three-dimensional simulation. The results obtained from this study show that models and numerical methods selected are appropriate to correctly predict the combustion processes within the furnace. In conclusion, the validation of this numerical model and our home-made code provides the user a complete tool to evaluate the performance of a boiler under different operating conditions, reducing the cost of experimental tests.