Oxygen Carrier Aided Combustion (OCAC) of Wood Chips in a 12 MWth Circulating Fluidized Bed Boiler Using Steel Converter Slag as Bed Material

The novel combustion concept Oxygen Carrier Aided Combustion (OCAC) is realized by addition of an active oxygen-carrying bed material to conventional fluidized bed boilers. The active bed material is meant to become reduced in fuel-rich parts of the boiler and oxidized in oxygen-rich parts, thus potentially providing advantages such as new mechanisms for oxygen transport in space and time. In this study, oxygen-carrier particles prepared from so called Linz-Donawitz (LD)-slag are examined as active bed material in a 12 MWth Circulating Fluidized Bed (CFB) boiler. LD-slag is the second largest by-product in steel making and is generated in the basic LD oxygen converter process. The experimental campaign lasted for two full weeks. The fuel was wood chips. LD-slag worked well from an operational point of view and no problems related to handling, agglomeration or sintering were experienced, albeit the production of fly ash increased. The boiler temperature profile suggested that fuel conversion in the main boiler body was facilitated, but the effect did not readily translate into reduced emissions from the stack. Spraying an aqueous solution of ammonium sulphate directly into the cyclone outlet with the aim of rejecting alkali metals as alkali suphates was found to solve the problems related to carbon monoxide emissions, suggesting that the problems could be due to the poor ability of LD-slag to absorb certain ash components. Use of a mixed bed consisting of 10–50 wt% LD-slag, with the remaining part being silica sand for ash absorption, also worked well. It is concluded that LD-slag could be a very cheap and readily available oxygen-carrying bed material for use in fluidized bed applications.