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Mechanical Engineering

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Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

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2018

Coal

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Pore-Resolving Simulation Of Char Particle Gasification Using Micro-Ct, Greg Hingwah Fong, Scott Jorgensen, Simcha L. Singer Jul 2018

Pore-Resolving Simulation Of Char Particle Gasification Using Micro-Ct, Greg Hingwah Fong, Scott Jorgensen, Simcha L. Singer

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Understanding the interaction between transport, reaction and morphology at the scale of individual char particles is important for optimizing solid fuel gasification and combustion processes. However, most particle-scale models treat porous char particles as an effective porous continuum, even though the presence of large, irregular macropores, voids and fractures render such upscaled treatments mathematically invalid, and the models non-predictive. A new modeling framework is therefore proposed to elucidate the impact of morphology on char particle gasification and combustion. A pore-resolving, transient, three-dimensional simulation for gasification of a realistic coal char particle is developed based on X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). The …


An Efficient Coal Pyrolysis Model For Detailed Tar Species Vaporization, Jianqing Li, Simcha L. Singer Mar 2018

An Efficient Coal Pyrolysis Model For Detailed Tar Species Vaporization, Jianqing Li, Simcha L. Singer

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

An accurate and computationally efficient model for the vaporization of many tar species during coal particle pyrolysis has been developed. Like previous models, the molecular fragments generated by thermal decomposition are partitioned into liquid metaplast, which remains in the particle, and vapor, which escapes as tar, using a vapor-liquid equilibrium(VLE) sub-model. Multicomponent VLE is formulated as a rate-based process, which results in an ordinary differential equation (ODE) for every species. To reduce the computational expense of solving many ODEs, the model treats tar and metaplast species as a continuous distribution of molecular weight. To improve upon the accuracy of …