Investigation on the volatile combustion and Fuel-N to NO conversion during pulverized fuel ignition process

The volatile combustion and NO release characteristics of pulverized fuel (PF) flames in an optical flat-flame entrained-flow reactor were investigated by CH∗/NO∗ chemiluminescence imaging. Pyrolyzed bituminous (PB) char with an ultralow volatile content (Vdaf≈10%) and a comparative coal sample of Shenhua (SH) bituminous coal with a high volatile content (Vdaf = 34.2%) were studied under different ambient O2 mole fractions (10%∼30%). The initiation of the combustion region of PB char occurs later than SH bituminous coal, owing to its low volatile contents, a slow devolatilization rate, and homogeneous-heterogeneous ignition/combustion mode. By measuring probed solid and gas samples, the conversion ratios of fuel-N to NO and the releasing ratios of volatile-N/char-N were determined in ignition process. Semi-quantitative NO release integral intensity and volatile combustion intensity results were obtained by integrating the NO∗ or CH∗ chemiluminescence intensity in the corresponding reaction region. The volatile combustion and NO release show good synchronous for Shenhua bituminous coal, which means that the NO releasing originated predominantly and owned higher conversion ratio from the volatile-N in the ignition region. The NO release integral intensity and NO emission of SH bituminous coal decreased with O2 concentration increased from 20% to 30%, which indicates that the enriched-O2 environment is beneficial for high volatiles bituminous to decrease NOx emission in ignition stage. For PB char, NO releasing originated predominantly from the char heterogeneous reactions of char-N in its ignition and combustion late stage.