Performance of solid fuel burners in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The energy has been one of the main crises in the world; hence, it is essential to save and utilize it in its optimized form. One of the major fuels available in the world is fossil fuel. When harnessing energy from fossil fuel, burning process is used with the help of burners and boilers. The efficiency of these systems is very important to get the maximum energy conversion. Therefore, the performance of the burner and the boiler affect the fuel consumption. The old burners in industries will have to be evaluated for performance to decide whether they can be improved or weather to rehabilitate the burner unit. The performances vary with different factors which need to be found out in this thesis. Then the solutions can be introduced for the inefficiency in burner to get the optimum operation. Burners use different types of firing technologies to harness the energy from the fuel. Its’ technology, type of fuel used and size of the burner need to be identified in order to evaluate the performance of the burner. There are two methods used to evaluate the performances of burners. This research is focused on performance of solid fuel burners used in Sri Lanka. The existing burners can then be improved using performance results which is the focus in this research. Many burners used in country are conventional burners and they use basic technology for burning. Reduction of fuel wastage, improvement of safety and reduction of environmental pollution are some of the improvements from the performance evaluation. The significant parameters that effect the performance of burner are identified using the indirect method. Those are moisture content of solid fuel, ambient temperature, carbon content of fuel, exhaust temperature and excess air supplied. Some of the parameters identified, can be optimized to improve the performance of burner as described. The direct method results and indirect method results are compared and it is evident that the indirect method interprets much descriptive results. The results are depend on specific heat capacity of flue gas but it won't depend on specific heat capacity of steam generated. Burners and boilers in other countries show more variations of efficiency with moisture content compared to the Sri Lanka's.