Improving mixing and gasification characteristics in an industrial-scale entrained flow gasifier with a novel burner

Improvements were made to a multi-channel burner, the most commonly used burner type, aimed at mitigating slagging in an industrial entrained flow gasifier for post-processing raw syngas. The novel design is referred to as a fully mixed burner. This research describes investigations of the effect of burner structure on the mixing and gasification characteristics using 1:2.5 (geometry reduction) small-scale airflow experiments and full-size numerical simulations. Experimental results show that, within the multi-channel burner and fully mixed burner, the penetration depths of the external gasifying agent into the raw syngas are 0.04 and 0.8, and the area-averaged temperature difference plateaus at 0.35 and 0.18, respectively. By changing the feeding mode, the fully mixed burner significantly expands the contact area of raw syngas and gasifying agent, so as to enhance the mixing of these two flows. Three-dimensional simulation results show that the whole raw syngas from the multi-channel burner and the full mixed burner is heated to around 1350 °C and 1550 °C, respectively. In the gasifier with the novel burner, the temperature of the near-burner wall and bottom outlet surpass 1500 °C and 1600 °C, respectively. The gasifier's continuous and stable slag tapping is feasible as solid slag would not have blocked the bottom outlet.