Practically Applied Fruitful Results and Finally Designed Images in High Performance Industrial Furnace Development Project and the Future Scope

With Japan's preparation of its "Action program to prevent global warning" in 1990 and the holding of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) in 1992 as a backdrop, reflecting the global effort to protect the environment, a "high performance industrial furnace development project" was launched in 1993 by the New Energy & Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). This project focuses on the development of a combustion technology which uses air that is preheated to extremely high temperatures (above 1,000'c), heretofore considered impossible. Not only can this technology reduce carbon dioxide emission, thought to cause the greenhouse effect, by over 30%, but it can also reduce nitrogen oxide emission by nearly half. This new technology makes use of the recently developed high cycle regenerative heat exchanger, for preheating the furnace air supply. This exchanger preheats air to above 1,000'C, much higher than for conventional furnaces, and then this air is injected with fuel. R&D data have shown that CO2 and NOx emissions can be reduced markedly. However, the theoretical analysis is yet to be made,thereby hampering efforts to have this advanced technology become widely adopted. Our project accumulated new many datas related with uniform temperature distribution, high exergy heat transfer and low NOx as common characteristics of high temperature air combustion. This time we explain the above mentioned datas and analysis results, then show practical applied high performance industrial furnaces designed images.