Assessment of engineering gas radiation methods in an industrial glass furnace configuration

This work is dedicated to a comparison of various methods of gaseous flames radiation in a tri-dimensional configuration representative of a glass furnace studied at Saint Gobain Research Paris.

The Influence of Real Gas Radiation On the Stability and Development of Benard Convection in a Two-Dimensional Layer

The influence of real gas radiation on the thermal and hydrodynamic stability is investigated in a two-dimensional layer of radiatively participating H2O and/or CO2 heated from below. The non-gray radiation effects of the two species are treated rigorously using a global spectral approach, the Spectral Line Weighted-sum-of-gray-gases model. The phenomena are explored by solving the full coupled laminar equations of motion, energy, and radiative transfer from the low-Rayleigh number, pure conduction-radiation regime through the onset of buoyancy-induced flow to the developed Bénard convection regime. The evolution of the thermal, velocity, and radiative heating fields is studied, and the critical Rayleigh number is characterized as a function of species mole fraction, average layer gas temperature, layer depth, wall emissivity, and the total gas pressure. It is found that participating radiation in the medium has the effect of stabilizing the layer, delaying transition to buoyancy-induced flow. The development of buoyancy-induced flow and temperature, along with the radiative heating are presented. It is found that the critical Rayleigh number in the radiatively participating gas layer can be more than an order of magnitude higher than the classical convection-only scenario. The onset of instability is found to depend on the species mole fractions, average gas temperature in the layer, wall emissivity, layer depth, and total pressure. Generally, all other variables being the same, H2O has a greater stabilizing influence on the layer than CO2.

Application of the Multi-Spectral Correlated-k Distribution Model to Multi-Dimensional Rectangular Enclosure Gas Radiation Calculations

The Multi-Spectral Correlated-k distribution model (MSCk) is an amelioration of the widely used Ck model. In the MSCk model, the breakdown of correlation assumption used in the original Ck model for non-uniform media is overcome by introducing the clustering of scaling functions. The principle of MSCk model is to group together wavenumbers with respect to the spectral scaling functions—defined as the ratio between spectral absorption coefficients in distinct states—so that the correlation assumption can be considered as exact over the corresponding intervals of wavenumbers. Until now, validations of the MSCk model in 0D and 1D test cases have already been performed in the previous work (Andre, F., Hou, L., Roger, M. and Vaillon, R., 2014. The multispectral gas radiation modeling: A new theoretical framework based on a multidimensional approach to k-distribution methods. Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, 147, pp.178–195; Andre, F., Hou, L. and Solovjov, V.P., 2016. An Exact Formulation of k-Distribution Methods in Non-Uniform Gaseous Media and its Approximate Treatment Within the Multi-Spectral Framework. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 676(1)). However, its application to multi-dimensional configurations (much closer to industrial applications) has not been conducted. Accordingly, in the present paper, we focus our attention on the application of the MSCk model to Multi-dimensional calculations.

An accurate lumped convective plus radiative heat exchanger model for performance-based modelling

There are several thermo-fluid process modelling tools available on the market which can be used to analyze the off-design performance of thermal plants. These tools all offer the user with a simple convective heat exchanger component that requires the design-base process conditions as inputs. The tools would then calculate an effective overall heat transfer factor (UA) and make use of gas flow mass ratios to scale the UA value for off-design conditions. The models employed in these tools assume that the contribution of gas radiation is insignificant, hence only applies convection scaling laws. This paper presents an improved model which considers the contribution of the gas and particle radiation, as is often encountered in the first few heaters in coal fired boilers and heat recovery steam generators. A more fundamental scaling law is applied for the convection scaling and incorporates a cleanliness factor which allows for the consideration of fouling of the heater surfaces. The model’s performance was validated against a discretized tube-level heater model that solves the fundamental convection and radiation terms. The model is accurate within 1% for the cases considered, as compared to more than 20% error if radiation contribution is not considered.