Computational and Experimental Investigation of an Industrial Biomass Furnace

An industrial biomass boiler of 200 kW thermal power is analyzed by computational and experimental methods. Gas composition and temperature within the furnace and in the downstream heat exchanger are measured. Combustion, flow and heat transfer processes within the furnace, exhaust tract as well as the forced convection on the water side of the heat exchanger are computationally investigated by the finite volume method‐based computational fluid dynamics procedures. The predictions are compared with the experiments. A satisfactory overall agreement between the predicted and measured temperatures is observed with an average deviation about 5 %. For oxygen mole fractions a fair agreement is found that shows deviations within the range of 10–20 %. For carbon monoxide, calculations exhibit a stronger underprediction. An industrial waste wood burning boiler with a nominal thermal power of 200 kW is investigated computationally and experimentally. Comparison of the computational results with the measurements confirm that accurate useful results can be obtained from the computational model especially for the gas temperature in the furnace and in the exhaust track through the convective heat exchanger tubes.