Thermal radiation and chemical reactions in combustion of biofuels

This paper presents a comprehensive numerical method to analyse thermal radiation and chemical reactions in combustion processes for biofuels in a fixed bed. The overfire air region and the bed are modelled simultaneously. A finite volume method is applied. It is found that SIMPLEC is preferable compared to SIMPLE in handling the pressure-velocity linkage in this case. The results show that the model provides reasonable distributions of the temperature distribution but some parameters, alpha (a weighting factor), d(p) the particle diameter, and the porosity distribution should be chosen carefully. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.