CFD Applications for Coal/Air Balancing in Power Plants

A new method for balancing coal / air flow to individual burners connected to a mill in a pulverized coal fired unit was proposed. A generalized calculation procedure based on this method was developed for sizing the orifices needed for balancing the coal / air flow. Efficient use of commercially available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software was suggested for the calculation of the pressure drop in pipes with unclear specifications of geometries. The current industry practice is to balance the clean air flow and accept the resulting imbalance in the coal / air flow. By this new method the clean-air flow would be unbalanced in a tailored manner so that balanced coal / air flow would result. In order to implement this new method the power plants would still have to conduct clean air tests only.