OCR Text |
Show SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The Pennsylvania State University Fuels and Combustion Laboratory plane flame furnace has been successfully employed to identify those primary coal properties that have the greatest influence on determining the combustibility characteristics (read ignition and burnout) of a particular coal. Volatile matter content appears to dominate over reactivity when the raw coal rank is near-constant. Moreover, this behavior has been elucidated by burning several of the coals that have been prepared into coal-water slurry fuels. Thus, if much of the ignition quality of a raw coal is maintained in that of the slurry, then these singular data can be used to quantify some of the behavior witnessed in coal-water slurry combustion tests thus far, i.e., loss-of-ignition and stability upon loss of volatile matter content. Because of this, it is proposed that plane flame furnace ignition and burnout tests should be used as an integral part of the screening of candidate coals for their use in coal-water slurry fuels. Research is continuing in this area at the PSU-FCL in order to replace, with dispatch, all the letters in Tables II and III with numbers. Experiments in which solid, liquid, gaseous, and two-phase fuels, such as coal slurries, are all fired in one combustor, and the flame characteristics directly compared, are now justified. Such research is currently underway at The Pennsylvania State University Fuels and Combustion Laboratory using a prototype multi-phase burner system. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Support for this research from the Pennsylvania Science and Engineer ing Foundation is greatly appreciated. 17-24 |