Yuanqiang Duan gained his bachelor’s degree from Nanjing Normal University in China, and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Energy and Environment at China’s Southeast University. He joined LACER as a one-year visiting student in December 2017. His work is focused on the combustion and emission characteristics of coal during the pressurized oxy-fuel fluidized bed combustion (POFBC) process.
Research
Oxy-combustion is among the major coal-fired power plant carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. The largest obstacle to the development and application of this technology currently is the net efficiency penalty associated with the high cost of the air separation and compression purification units. Pressurized oxy-combustion in fluidized bed combustion is considered the next generation oxy-fuel combustion for CCS, due to its techno-economic benefits in cascade utilization of energy, heat recovery from the latent heat of vapor and high CO2 purity enrichment.
Variations in hydrodynamics, heat transfer and chemical reactions caused by the “high pressure, high CO2” environment will inevitably affect the coal combustion process, which should be the key issue addressed. Duan’s present work aims to realize the accurate extrapolation of the combustion process, with his primary efforts targeting: 1) fluidization under high pressure; 2) conversion pathway for fuel-N and fuel-S; 3) pressurized coal combustion experiments and mechanism research; and 4) process simulation and optimization of the POFBC system.
