Flue gas recirculation and enhanced performance of waste incinerators under waste uncertainty.

Variations in waste quantities and composition affect incinerator operating conditions and performance. Fluegas volumes consititute a dominant environmental and financial consideration for efficient waste incinerator (WI) operation, since they affect the temperature, throughput, air pollution control system (APCS) residence time, and pollutant emissions, when the charging rate or composition of any waste is varying. Fluegas recirculation (FGR) in WI is an effective technique for reducing WI atmospheric pollution, mainly NOx emissions, albeit affecting WI throughput, temperature and destruction/removal efficiency. FGR refers to mass recirculation of a possibly cooled fraction of fluegases and differs substantially from fluegas heat recovery. The present work shows that, besides emission control, suitable manipulation of FGR enhances WI performance under waste uncertainty, enabling higher throughput, at the desired temperature and within the allowed APCS residence time range. A dimensionless parameter related to the uncertain wastes' net enthalpy contribution is isolated, which encompasses heat of reaction and enthalpy outflows from fluegas and solids and which reveals whether throughput is decreasing or increasing with temperature and FGR ratio. Normalized throughput and total fluegas volume isotherms manifest the interdependence and enable manipulation for enhanced environmental and economic performance.

[1]  C. A. Tsiliyannis.  Report: comparison of environmental impacts from solid waste treatment and disposal facilities , 1999 .

[2]  S. Kerdsuwan,et al.  Experimental Study on Preheated Air and Flue Gas Recirculation in Solid Waste Incineration , 2010 .

[3]  Nicola Verdone,et al.  The benefits of flue gas recirculation in waste incineration. , 2007, Waste management.

[4]  Christos Aristeides Tsiliyannis,et al.  Alternative fuels in cement manufacturing: Modeling for process optimization under direct and compound operation , 2012 .

[5]  S Consonni,et al.  Alternative strategies for energy recovery from municipal solid waste Part A: Mass and energy balances. , 2005, Waste management.

[6]  W. R. Seeker,et al.  Engineering analysis of hazardous waste incineration energy and mass balance , 1987 .

[7]  S Consonni,et al.  Alternative strategies for energy recovery from municipal solid waste Part B: Emission and cost estimates. , 2005, Waste management.

[8]  Daniel E. Rivera,et al.  Simulation-based optimization of process control policies for inventory management in supply chains , 2006, Autom..

[9]  C A Tsiliyannis,et al.  End-of-life flows of multiple cycle consumer products. , 2011, Waste management.

[10]  Randolph Kirchain,et al.  Modeling methods for managing raw material compositional uncertainty in alloy production , 2007 .

[11]  Eswaran Subrahmanian,et al.  Design and planning under uncertainty: issues on problem formulation and solution , 2003, Comput. Chem. Eng..

[12]  C A Tsiliyannis,et al.  Internal cycle modeling and environmental assessment of multiple cycle consumer products. , 2012, Waste management.

[13]  G D Hinshaw,et al.  Hazardous waste incineration emissions in perspective. , 2001, Waste management.

[14]  Marco J. Castaldi,et al.  The Case for Increasing the Global Capacity for Waste to Energy (WTE) , 2010 .