Co-firing Performance of a Retrofitted Oxy-Combustor burning Coal/Biomass Blends: Experimental and Simulation Study

Oxy-fuel combustion is a clean coal technology based on firing fuel in an enriched oxygen atmosphere to obtain a high CO2 concentration in the off-gases. This technology can be combined with the co-firing biomass and the use of blends of coal and biomass can compensate for the fact that the gas properties in the furnace in an oxycombustion process differ from the air-firing case (oxy-firing flue gases have a higher heat capacity and emissivity than for the air-firing case). As a consequence, the use of biomass fuels, albeit that they have a lower heating value than coal could reduce such effects. In this paper the latest experimental results using a retrofitted 100 kWth oxyfuel combustor at Cranfield University are presented. In addition, this experimental data is used to validate a newly developed Aspen Plus simulation a model for oxy-fuel firing.