Development of an inverse method to identify the kinetics of heavy metal release during waste incineration in fluidized bed

This paper deals with the emission of heavy metals (HM) during the incineration of municipal solid waste in a fluidized bed reactor. This study focused on the development of a general method to identify the kinetics of vaporization of heavy metals from the on-line analysis of exhaust gas. This method is an inverse method, which requires only the time evolution of the HM concentration in exhaust gases (experimental data) and a global bubbling bed model developed for transient conditions at the reactor scale. First, a lab-scale fluidized bed incinerator was set-up to simulate the HM release during the thermal treatment of metal-spiked model wastes. A specific on-line analysis system based on ICP-OES was developed to measure in real time the variation of the relative concentration of HM in exhaust gases. Then, a two-phase flow bubbling bed model was developed and validated to calculate the kinetics of vaporization of HM from its measured concentration time profile in the outlet gas. The technique was first validated with model waste (metal-spiked mineral matrices), thus enabling at each time both solid sampling for measuring the HM vaporization kinetic and on-line analysis for measuring the HM concentration in the outlet gas. The inverse method was then applied to realistic artificial wastes (derived from real wastes) to identify the HM vaporization kinetics from the on-line analysis results.