Measurements of the flame emissivity and radiative properties of particulate medium in pulverized-coal-fired boiler furnaces by image processing of visible radiation

Abstract Due to the complicated processes for coal particles burning in industrial furnaces, their radiative properties, such as the absorption and scattering coefficients, which are essential to make reliable calculation of radiative transfer in combustion computation, are hard to be given exactly by the existing methods. In this paper, multiple color image detectors were used to capture approximately red, green, and blue monochromatic radiative intensity images in the visible wavelength region, and the flame emissivity and the radiative properties of the particulate media in three pulverized-coal-fired boiler furnaces were got from the flame images. It was shown that as the load increased, the flame emissivity and the radiative properties increased too; these radiative parameters had the largest values near the burner zone, and decreased along the combustion process. Compared with the combustion medium with a low-volatile anthracite coal burning in a 670 t/h boiler, the emissivity and the absorption coefficient of the medium with a high-volatile bituminous coal burning in a 1025 t/h boiler were smaller near the outlet zone, but were larger near the burner zone of the furnace, due to the significant contribution of soot to the radiation. This work will be of practical importance in modeling and calculating the radiative heat transfer in combustion processes, and improving the technology for in situ, multi-dimensional visualization of large-scale combustion processes in coal-fired furnaces of power plants.