Investigation of Temperature and Flow Fields in an Alternative Design of Industrial Cracking Furnaces Using CFD

Enhanced design strategies in the industrial cracking furnaces are of practical interest for petrochemical industries. For such engineering purposes the exact simulation of temperature and flow fields in the furnace is mandatory. In this paper, a study was conducted to simulate 3D flue gas flow pattern and temperature field in the radiation section of an industrial cracking furnace in order to improve the design of the steam cracking furnaces, employing the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. The steady-state Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations were solved, in a finite volume scheme for a turbulent premixed flow applying the renormalization group (RNG) version of the k −ε model, together with global combustion kinetics for methane-hydrogen-air. Calculation of the Damkhöler number and optical-thickness was conducted to identify the appropriate methods for the numerical modeling of radiation and turbulence-chemistry interaction phenomena. The predicted results match the literature data quite well. The validated numerical procedure was then employed to investigate alternative design attributed to different burner locations. The alternative design resulted in a more uniform temperature profile on the reactor tubes as well as lower peak flame temperature.