Simulation on Coal Devolatilization Combined a Multi-Step Kinetic Model with Chemkin Software

As the first step in coal combustion and gasification, coal devolatilization has significant effect on reaction process. Previous coal devolatilization models have some disadvantages, such as poor flexibility, model complexity, and requirement of characterization parameters. Recently, Sommariva et al. have proposed a multi-step kinetic model of coal devolatilization. This model avoids the disadvantages mentioned above and can predict elemental composition of tar and char. In this paper, the mechanism of this model has been revised for simple application to Chemkin. Revision method is that some reactions are split into more reactions by using one pseudo-intermediate-product to replace several final products. Simulation results show that calculation results from revised mechanism compare quite well with that from original mechanism and have good agreement with experimental data. The revised mechanism is accurate and can be applied to Chemkin very easily, which gives it wide application to simulation of coal pyrolysis, gasification and combustion.