An Innovative Volatile Organic Compound Incinerator

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are a byproduct of many processes across industrial sectors. Instead of venting the raw waste to the atmosphere, many industries must first use incineration systems to convert the VOCs to less harmful combustion products. However, in order to ensure a high degree of VOC destruction, incineration systems often require a significant amount of supplemental fuel added to the waste stream. In this work, a novel combustion device was developed to incinerate waste VOC streams with reduced supplemental fuel consumption. The device, termed a “Swiss-roll”, embeds a combustion chamber inside of a spiral heat exchanger. The heat exchanger recovers heat from the combustion exhaust stream to the premixed inlet reactant stream, thus increasing the adiabatic flame temperature of the combustion reaction and extending the flammability limits of the fuel. With efficient heat recuperation, a combustion reaction is stabilized at ultra-lean, super-adiabatic conditions, resulting in reduced supplemental fuel consumption and harmful emissions. In addition, the preheated reactants enable the combustion reaction to be stabilized at a temperature where the NOx emission is negligible. In this work, a Swiss-roll incinerator was fabricated and experimentally tested to demonstrate self-sustained, ultra-lean incineration with low harmful emissions. The experimental results and potential applications for the Swiss-roll incinerator are discussed.