Improvement of operating conditions in waste incinerators using engineering tools

Operation parameters such as waste feed rate, air supply, and temperature of the gas in incineration plants should be carefully determined for various situations, which include seasonal and annual changes in fuel characteristics, and performance change of the hardware. These changes may cause off-design point operation of the incinerators, which results in many problems in operation of the flue gas treatment system, low-oxygen in the combustion chamber, thermal damage of the incinerator wall, and so on. In this study, an engineering approach using computational tools along with field tests and observation is presented. For computational tools, a 0-dimensional model for heat and mass balance, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and a global prediction model for dioxin are employed. They play a key role in diagnosing incineration systems and evaluating changes in operating conditions. The typical results of each tool are reported, and examples of improvement in operating performance are described.