Abstract—Biomass fuels come from many varieties of sources resulting in a wide range of sizes, physical and chemical properties. Among the technologies that can be used for biomass combustion, fluidized beds are emerging as the best due to their flexibility and high efficiency. The emissions from Fluidized Bed Combustor (FBC) are dependent on a number of operating conditions (temperature, excess air, fuel feed rate, etc) and fuel particle size. In the present work the effect of fuel particle size on emissions and over all combustion efficiency of groundnut in the fluidized bed combustor has been discussed. The river sand was used for ensuring sustainable fuel ignition and combustion in FBC. The Fluidized bed was operated at constant feed rate 25 kg/h of groundnut shells for various excess air factors (20-100%) and for the different fuel particle sizes. The effect of excess air factor and fuel particle size on the concentration profiles of the major gaseous emissions (CO and CO2), combustion efficiency, as well as the temperature profiles along the combustor height, was investigated. Based on CO emission and unburned carbon content in fly ash, the combustion efficiency of the Fluidized bed combustor was calculated for the ground nut shells fired under different operating conditions. The maximum combustion efficiency of the groundnut shells is found to be 89.5% for lower particle size (0.273mm)
Index Terms—Fluidized bed combustion; groundnut shells; combustion efficiency; operating conditions; particle size; emissions.
The authors are with the National Institute of Technology Warangal INDIA (e-mail: srinath@ nitw.ac.in; v.redddy@ nitw.ac.in).
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Cite: Srinath Suranani and Venkat Reddy Goli, "Fuel Particle Size Effect on Performance of Fluidized Bed Combustor Firing Ground Nutshells," International Journal of Chemical Engineering and Applications vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 147-151, 2012.
