Design and Simulation of a Hybrid Entrained-Flow and Fluidized Bed Mild Gasifier: Part 1—Design Considerations and Development of a Multiphase Model
A mild gasification process has been developed to provide an innovative form of clean coal technology, which can be utilized to build a new, highly efficient, and compact power plant or to retrofit an existing coal-fired power plant in order to achieve lower emissions and significantly improved thermal efficiency. The core technology of the mild gasification power plant lies on the design of a compact and effective mild gasifier that can produce synthesis gases with high energy volatiles through a hybrid system: utilizing the features of both entrained-flow and fluidized bed gasifiers. The objectives of this study are to (a) describe the features and design considerations of this mild gasifier and (b) develop a multiphase computational model to guide the design of the mild-gasifier by investigating the thermal-flow and gasification process inside a conceptual mild gasifier. Due to the involvement of a fluidized bed, the Eulerian-Eulerian method is employed to calculate both the primary phase (air) and the secondary phase (coal particles). Multiphase constitutive equations developed from kinetic theory are employed for calculating the effective shear viscosities, bulk viscosities, and effective thermal conductivities of granular flows to simulate the hydrodynamic and thermal interactions between the solid and gas phases. Multiphase Nativer-Stokes equations and seven global reaction equations with associated species transported equations are implementd to simulate the mild gasification process. Part 1 of this paper documents the design principle of the mild gasifier as well as the development of the computational model starting from single phase, then using multiple phases, and finally including all reactions in the multiphase flow.