R&D on Advanced Low Nox Syngas Burner (II)

This two-year proposal belongs to the field of energy-saving technology aiming to develop an advanced low NOx syngas (H2+CO) burner which is important because low NOx syngas burner has several advantages on energy-saving, pollution prevention, and carbon reduction. The motivation of the present proposal comes from the fact that all developed countries have actively promoted and invested various clean energy technologies in order to confront enormous challenges from global warming and shortage of fossil fuels. One of the most attracting technologies is the clean coal utilization that aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fire power plants as well as chemical and steel-refining factories. Further, one of the key clean coal technologies is the direct use of syngas derived from advanced gasification processes. The proposed low NOx syngas burner is useful not only for emission reduction and pollution improvement in the coal-fired plant but also for increasing fuel flexibility such as the usage of biomass and waste materials. Thus, it will be of help in decreasing petroleum and natural gas demands. From the past to the present and even to several decades in the future, combustion is still the major means to provide the total energy consumption in the world from the electricity power generation sector to various transportation sectors to industrial furnaces and burners. Many countries, such as Taiwan and USA, nearly 90 % of total energy consumption is provided by fossil fuels. This is because typical hydrocarbon fuels have roughly 100 times energy density (~ 45 MJ/kg) higher than that of modern lithium batteries (~ 0.5 MJ/kg) and thus fossil fuels even with prices up to US$140 per barrel are still the most competitive fuel in many aspects. However, the challenge of mankind today is the global carbon problem, especially for the need of CO2 reduction due to the global climate change. Hence, this proposal applies the advanced lean premixed turbulent combustion technology together with weakly swirling jet streams to develop a single-digit low-NOx syngas burner. This two-year proposal will be based on our already established nature gas burning technologies with hydrogen doping and the goal is to develop a single-digit low-NOx syngas (H2+CO) burner that can be applied to stationary power generation or automobile for cleaner burning having environmental advantages of CO2 reduction with very low-NOx emissions. During the first year project, we have obtained fundamental results on high-pressure turbulent burning velocities of syngas fuels which are important for the usage of syngas burning. These results were just published in International Journal of Hydrogen Energy (SCI, Impact Factor = 4.053) with the title “Hydrogen/carbon monoxide syngas burning rates measurements in high-pressure quiescent and turbulent environment”, Vol. 36, pp. 8595-8603, 2011. The goal of the second year project is to integrate two different technologies: namely a low-NOx weakly-swirling turbulent combustion and the high-efficiency lean premixed turbulent combustion and thus to develop a high-efficiency low- NOx syngas burner especially for the usage of the entrained flow syngas of clean coal technology.