Numerical flow modeling of power plant windboxes
- Babcock & Wilcox, Barberton, OH (United States)
Numerical flow modeling has become an increasingly important design and analysis tool for improving the air distribution to power plant burners. Uniform air distribution allows the burners to perform as designed to achieve the lowest possible emissions and best fuel burn-out. Modifications can be made internal to the existing windbox to improve the burner-to-burner and burner peripheral air distributions. These modifications can include turning vanes, flow splitters, perforated plate, and burner shrouding. Numerical modeling allows the analysis of design trade-offs between adding flow resistance, fan power, and windbox modification construction cost. Numerical modeling has advantages over physical modeling in that actual geometric scales and air temperatures are used. Advantages over a field data based study include the ability to quickly and cheaply analyze a variety of design options without actually modifying the windbox, and the availability of significantly more data with which to interpret the results. Costs to perform a numerical study are generally one-half to one-third of the cost to perform a physical flow model and can be one-forth of the cost to perform a field study. The continued development of affordable, high speed, large memory workstations and reliable, commercially available computation fluid dynamics (CFD) software allows practical analyses of power plant windboxes. This paper discusses (1) the impact of air distribution on burner performance, (2) the methodology used to perform numerical flow modeling of power plant windboxes, and (3) the results from several windbox analyses including available post-modification observations.
- OSTI ID:
- 405454
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-951208-; TRN: 96:004301-0002
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Power-Gen America `95: power generation conference, Anaheim, CA (United States), 5-7 Dec 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of Power-Gen `95. Book V: Operating plants. Volume 1 - performance enhancement. Volume 2 - operation & maintenance cost reduction; PB: 364 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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