Study on the combustion behaviours of two high-volatile coal particle streams with high-speed OH-PLIF

An optical entrained flow reactor, based on a downward flat-flame, was established to explore the devolatilization and volatile combustion behaviours of coal particle streams with surrounding temperatures from 1600 K to 1800 K and oxygen mole fractions in the range of 10%–30%. The coal particle streams with particle sizes of 53–80 μm are two kinds of high-volatile pulverized bituminous coal and lignite. Using High-speed Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence to diagnose OH (OH-PLIF), the planar sheet-imaging of OH-radicals was obtained to visualize the coal particle flames, and then, the normalized fluorescence signal intensity along the distance downstream from the burner and along the radial distance was obtained to investigate the volatiles combustion process. From the planar sheet-imaging, the ignition of tested high-volatile bituminous coal and lignite is dominated by the combustion of their volatiles. The combustion processes of volatiles can be divided into 4 stages: ignition, accelerating burning, stable burning and feeble burning, to investigate the intrinsic combustion correlation phenomena. The relative standard deviation (RSD) changes of the OH radial profiles can provide a new insight into flame stabilization, wherein the flame stability of the bituminous coal particle stream is higher than that of lignite under the same combustion conditions. The volatiles combustion of lignite is more sensitive to the oxygen concentration and temperature than that of bituminous coal, and the volatile releasing ratio of bituminous coal (65%–81%) was substantially less than that of lignite (92%–100%) by the analysis of the char residues.