Co-combustion of biomass and gaseous fuel in a novel configuration of fluidized bed: Thermal characteristics

•Jetting-fountain fluidized bed enables smooth co-firing of biomass and gaseous fuel.•Applying jetting-fountain configuration dampens greatly freeboard overheating.•Heat gain by bed greatly increases with jetting-fountain configuration.•Increasing gaseous fuel ratio causes more reduction in freeboard overheating.•Heat gain by bed considerably increases with increasing gaseous fuel ratio. Experimental study on co-combustion of rice straw and natural gas has been performed in a fluidized bed. The used combustor allows the novel, jetting-fountain configuration and the conventional operation as well. In the jetting-fountain configuration, natural gas premixed with the air sufficient for combustion proceeds through the jet pipe to create a jetting-fountain zone. Whereas only the air required for rice straw combustion passes through the gas distributor. The experiments show that smooth combustion of natural gas with rice straw can be performed in the jetting-fountain fluidized bed avoiding acoustic effects and explosions of burning bubbles that occurs in conventional operation. The jetting-fountain fluidized bed is shown to dampen greatly the freeboard overheating at particularly lower bed temperatures. This is because the fountain-particles absorb a great part of heat released in the freeboard and recover it back to the bed. It is confirmed by measuring the in-bed cooling load that was found to increase considerably at lower bed temperatures. The natural gas contribution is found to play a major role when applying the jetting-fountain configuration. Increasing the natural gas contribution enlarges the fountain zone that causes greater reduction in the freeboard overheating and recovers more heat back to the bed. Measuring the in-bed cooling also approves the later conclusion.