Fuel characterisation for pulverised coal combustion

Two inherent challenges in coal characterisation for pulverised fuel (PF) combustion which this paper addresses are: (a) the very large scale and severe conditions at which PF combustion takes place, (b) the heterogeneous and diverse properties that coal, as a natural material, displays. Since it is not possible to reproduce full scale PF combustion in the laboratory it is difficult to apply sufficiently-high heating rates and temperatures to reproduce actual PF combustion conditions for coal combustion processes. Results from a novel captive-sample reactor, which can apply well-controlled heating rates of 10,000 K/s and above to peak temperatures up to 2000"C, will be used to illustrate the importance of applying realistically-severe conditions when characterising coals for NOx performance and inherent char reactivity. It will be shown how properly-obtained coal characterisation data can be related directly to full-scale utility plant performance.