Modelling of thermal characteristics in supercritical water oxidation reactors

Conference · Sun Dec 31 04:00:00 EST 1995

OSTI ID:435663

Oh, C H; Kochan, R J; Charlton, T R ^[1]; Bourhis, A L ^[2]

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1. Lockheed Martin Idaho Technologies, Idaho Falls, ID (United States). Idaho National Engineering Lab.
2. MODAR, Inc., Natick, MA (United States)

Supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) is a promising technology to treat hazardous organic wastes, capable of destruction efficiencies in excess of 99.9% at operating conditions of 600 C and 234.4 bar. Under these conditions, organic compounds are completely miscible with supercritical water, oxygen and nitrogen, and are rapidly oxidized to carbon dioxide and water. The essential part of the process is the reactor. Many reactor designs have been proposed, patented, and tested at both bench and pilot scales. These designs and performances need to be scaled up to a waste throughput 10--100 times that currently being tested. Scaling of this magnitude will be done by creating a numerical thermal-hydraulic model of the smaller reactor for which test data is available, validating the model against the available data, and then using the validated model to investigate the larger reactor performance. This paper presents initial steps in modelling a SCWO reactor using available computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. The results of this CFD model are compared with test data from a bench scale SCWO vessel reactor built and tested by MODAR, Inc. The calculations and test data presented in this paper consider the oxidation of ethanol in a supercritical environment. These results show good agreement when compared with the limited experimental data available. Additional modelling with pilot-scale test data is planned to further validate the simulation capability.

• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-94ID13223
• OSTI ID: 435663
• Report Number(s): CONF-951135--; ISBN 0-7918-1751-2
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
CHEMICAL REACTORS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
ORGANIC WASTES
OXIDATION
SUPERCRITICAL GAS EXTRACTION
THERMAL ANALYSIS
WATER VAPOR