Research On The Kinetic Measurement Of Solid Fuel Char Combustion Via MFB-IR Thermal Analyzer

Solid fuel (coal/biomass) char’s combustion kinetic data is one of the importantparameters for the combustion reactor design. As the traditional chemical reaction kineticanalyzer, thermo gravimetric (TG) analyzer and drop tube reactor have been widelyapplied by many researchers. With the further development of kinetic studies, somedifficulties occurred during the operation and calculation process in the analyzers.Although the Micro-Fluidized Bed (MFB) reactor has the advantage of heat and masstransfer, its adaptability and accuracy for chemical reaction kinetic analysis still need to bestudied. Therefore, a Micro-Fluidized Bed with fast online Infrared thermal analyzer(MFB-IR) is built in this study. It can achieve the instantaneous sample injection underisothermal condition, and the kinetic data can be obtained by using infrared gas detector tomonitor the product gas concentration change.Firstly the MFB-IR’s design process has been described, including the overall systemdesign principle, the programming of gas concentration data collection software and thecalculation of some key parameters. Then the CaCO3decomposition experiment wascarried out in both TG and MFB-IR analyzers by comparison. The results show that thekinetic data using MFB-IR is in the range of other literature results. Although the value ofthe apparent activation energy from MFB-IR is lower than the one from TG, its value isclose to real combustion situation.Moreover, the MSW char and coal char combustion kinetic experiment were alsocarried out in two thermal analyzers. The results show that the MFB-IR thermal analyzer issuitable for char combustion kinetic analysis and its kinetic values are in the range of otherliterature results. Even though the MSW and coal char’s apparent activation energy changewith conversion are different in MFB-IR and TG, their pre-exponential factor fromMFB-IR is much higher than the ones from TG. Therefore compared to TG, the combustionrate is faster in MFB, and it is much easier to close to the chemical control zone.