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ESSS presents results of study performed to Tractebel on PSE’09

Simulation was performed to analyse the causes of excessive erosion on boiler's water wall ducts at Jorge Lacerda thermal power plant


 Leonardo Paes Rangel
The "Numerical Simulation of Coal Boiler at Electric Thermal Plants Using Computational Fluid Dynamics" is a study developed by ESSS as a consulting service to Tractebel Energy. It was presented on the10th International Symposium on Process Systems Engineering (PSE2009), held on August 16 to 20, in Salvador, Brazil.

The purpose of the meeting was brought together the worldwide PSE community of researchers and practitioners who are involved in the creation and application of computing-based methodologies for planning, design, operation, control and maintenance of chemical and petrochemical process industries.

“Keep high efficiency of boilers in steam generation process is a great challenge for thermal power plants”, says Leonardo Paes Rangel (Ph.D.), ESSS Project Coordinator. “The efficiency of boilers can be analyzed by reducing maintenance stops due to the expensive costs in this equipment”.

Mr. Rangel said PSE’09 was an opportunity to present this simulation work to the PSE community. “We analyzed precisely the possible one of the causes of excessive erosion on steam ducts to discover how the misalignment of burners can force coal particles to wear boiler tubes. This study revealed the real nature of the problem”.


Burner geometry


Boiler geometry

The numerical simulation of the burner and the air-coal mixture on the boilers has been developed using the commercial software of Computational Fluid Dynamics (ANSYS CFX). It has been chosen based on itsrobustness in mesh generation and to solver conservation equations by finite volume method. This work was made in five stages:

  • Geometry: has been build using ANSYS Design Modeler;
  • Mesh Generation: has been generated using the software ANSYS ICEM CFD;
  • Pre-processing: the main assumptions in the boiler numerical simulation are steady state, isothermal, incompressible, turbulent, lower solid volumetric fraction within the equipment (Euler-Lagrange);
  • Equations Solving: ANSYS CFX-Solver has been applied to solve all conservation equations;
  • Post-processing: The CFD results allow detailed flow visualization, as recirculation zones, high velocities, etc. These results are generally presented in profiles planes, streamlines or vectors, showing the flow directions and preferential paths. In this work, it has focused the velocity field and particle track. The results allowed identify the equipment erosion tendencies.


    Mesh in the deflector


    Swirler regions

All results are in very good concordance with field observations according to engineers at UTLC from Tractebel Energia S.A..

Click here to read the article.


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