Some Computer Applications for Combustion Engineering with Solid Fuels

Publisher Summary The electrical generation industry is a vital element in the economic drive train. Until the last decades of the 20th century, the industry was functioning as a regulated monopoly with energy costs to customers that were usually tolerable and controlled by Public Utility Commissions or Public Service Commissions. The industry situation today shows coal-fired generation as the backbone of the electric supply—the coal being an essential resource as an affordable, plentiful, domestically available fuel. The use of coal is also supplemented by other solid fuels: petroleum coke, wood waste, agricultural biomass, and a host of industrial products used in niche applications. If the full advantage of coal’s availability and optimum use are to be realized in existing plants, the complexity of the total picture requires the integration of all the coal issues related to the supply, transportation, storage, costs, constituent analysis, combustion properties, and contingencies, as well as the understanding of the end product—the electric market with all its nuances. That requires optimum use of computers. This chapter describes some computer applications for combustion engineering with solid fuels. Computers are used in combustion engineering—particularly in the areas of combustion analysis and combustion control. Combustion analysis has involved extensive modeling of chemical reactions. Initial models were often simple heat and material balance models with or without temperature calculations.