CPFD modeling of hydrodynamics,combustion and NOx emissions in an industrial CFB boiler

The ultra-low NOx emission requirement (50 mg/m³) brings great challenge to CFB boilers in China. To further tap the NOx abatement potential, full understanding the fundamentals behind CFB boilers is needed. To achieve this, a comprehensive CPFD model is established and verified; gas-solid flow, combustion, and NOx emission behavior in an industrial CFB boiler are elaborated; influences of primary air volume and coal particle size on furnace performance are evaluated. Simulation results indicate that there exists a typical core-annular flow structure in the boiler furnace. Furnace temperature is highest in the bottom dense-phase zone (about 950 °C) and decreases gradually along the furnace height. Oxygen-deficient combustion results in high CO concentration and strong reducing atmosphere in the lower furnace. NOx concentration gradually increases in the bottom furnace, reaches maximum at the elevation of secondary air inlet, and then decreases slightly in the upper furnace. Appropriate decreasing the primary air volume and coal particle size would increase the CO concentration and intensify the in-furnace reducing atmosphere, which favors for NOx reduction and low NOx emission from CFB boilers.     

Retention mechanism of calcium ferrite and compositions of ash on selenium during chemical looping gasification

Selenium pollution by coal utilization is of increasing concern. Calcium-iron (Ca–Fe) oxygen carriers (OCs) and alkali metal ions have strong inhibitory effects on selenium, which can reduce the emissions of selenium vapor. The retention mechanisms of selenium by Fe₂O₃, CaFe₂O₄, Ca₂Fe₂O₅ and bottom ash are investigated during chemical looping gasification (CLG). Iron-based OC can oxidize H₂Se(g) to SeO₂(g); furthermore, lattice oxygen is released by Fe₂O₃, contributing to the formation of an Fe–O–Se structure to retain selenium and form selenite. Because calcium ferrite is poorly oxidizing, it cannot oxidize H₂Se(g), but the CaO produced when OCs are reduced can react with H₂Se(g) to form CaSe(s), and this process can be promoted by H₂S(g). The best retention rates reached 32.301% when Ca₂Fe₂O₅ was used. In the cyclic experiment, the selenium retention of the bottom ash gradually increases. Alkali metal ions in bottom ash are the main factor in retaining selenium. Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ do not easily vaporize due to their high melting points; therefore, their selenium retention is significantly better than that of K⁺ and Na⁺. This research provided a new idea for the removal of selenium by using OCs and bottom ash particles during CLG.     

Improved operator comfort and off-road capability through pendulum arm technology

The Nordic forest industry requires just-in-time wood deliveries. Operations must continue regardless of season, weather and terrain. Soil compaction and deep ruts must be avoided while providing high performance and a reasonable working environment for operators.The Xt28 pendulum arm forwarder is a full-size concept forwarder with six hydrostatic propelled wheels on pendulum arms built on a three-piece frame connected with two articulation joints. The Xt28 concept machine was tested according to Skogforsk standard machine tests. Rut depth test focused on soil interaction where rut depth was measured related to number of passes. Machine dynamics were measured using standardized test track with focus on operator comfort.The project proved the potential of pendulum arm technology in off-road transportation. Automatic pendulum arm levelling, equalized ground pressure between wheels and improved operator comfort through reducing adverse vibrations and roll angles, simultaneously reducing dynamic forces transferred to the forest floor. Pendulum arm technology improves travel speed in adverse terrain, providing unparalleled side slope capability and enhanced productivity.     

Development and implementation of an IOT based instrumentation system for computing performance of a tractor-implement system

A high precision and compact IOT based digital instrumentation setup to measure, display and record various tractor and implement system performance parameters was developed and installed on a 28.3 kW Tractor. The setup was capable of continuous monitoring and wirelessly transmitting tractor-implement performance parameters on a cloud platform such as engine speed, radiator fan speed, fuel consumption, draft, forward speed, lift arm angle, wheel slip, wheel slip, PTO speed, geo-location/position of the tractor, choking of seeds in the implement and vibrations experienced by the implement. For precision measurements, commercial transducers used in the system were calibrated and assessed under both static and dynamic conditions. The average calibration constant for fuel consumption, forward speed, lift arm angle and load cell were 0.00009804 L/pulse, 0.01610306 km/h/pulse, 0.056 mA/degree and 0.2575 mV/kN respectively. The system based on DataTaker DT 85 Data logger connected to a micro-computer through transducers capable of transferring data wirelessly was installed on John Deere 5038 tractor and was tested with a Spatially Modified No-Till Drill in agricultural field with varied implement depth.     

Accelerating fully resolved simulation of particle-laden flows on heterogeneous computer architectures

An efficient computing framework, namely PFlows, for fully resolved-direct numerical simulations of particle-laden flows was accelerated on NVIDIA General Processing Units (GPUs) and GPU-like accelerator (DCU) cards. The framework is featured as coupling the lattice Boltzmann method for fluid flow with the immersed boundary method for fluid-particle interaction, and the discrete element method for particle collision, using two fixed Eulerian meshes and one moved Lagrangian point mesh, respectively. All the parts are accelerated by a fine-grained parallelism technique using CUDA on GPUs, and further using HIP on DCU cards, i.e., the calculation on each fluid grid, each immersed boundary point, each particle motion, and each pair-particle collision is responsible by one computer thread, respectively. Coalesced memory accesses to LBM distribution functions with the data layout of Structure of Arrays are used to maximize utilization of hardware bandwidth. Parallel reduction with shared memory for data of immersed boundary points is adopted for the sake of reducing access to global memory when integrate particle hydrodynamic force. MPI computing is further used for computing on heterogeneous architectures with multiple CPUs-GPUs/DCUs. The communications between adjacent processors are hidden by overlapping with calculations. Two benchmark cases were conducted for code validation, including a pure fluid flow and a particle-laden flow. The performances on a single accelerator show that a GPU V100 can achieve 7.1–11.1 times speed up, while a single DCU can achieve 5.6–8.8 times speed up compared to a single Xeon CPU chip (32 cores). The performances on multi-accelerators show that parallel efficiency is 0.5–0.8 for weak scaling and 0.68–0.9 for strong scaling on up to 64 DCU cards even for the dense flow (φ = 20%). The peak performance reaches 179 giga lattice updates per second (GLUPS) on 256 DCU cards by using 1 billion grids and 1 million particles. At last, a large-scale simulation of a gas-solid flow with 1.6 billion grids and 1.6 million particles was conducted using only 32 DCU cards. This simulation shows that the present framework is prospective for simulations of large-scale particle-laden flows in the upcoming exascale computing era.     

Fully resolved simulations of viscoelastic suspensions by an efficient immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method

An efficient immersed boundary-lattice Boltzmann method (IB-LBM) is proposed for fully resolved simulations of suspended solid particles in viscoelastic flows. Stress LBM based on Giesekus and Oldroyd-B constitutive equation are used to model the viscoelastic stress tensor. A boundary thickening-based direct forcing IB method is adopted to solve the particle–fluid interactions with high accuracy for non-slip boundary conditions. A universal law is proposed to determine the diffusivity constant in a viscoelastic LBM model to balance the numerical accuracy and stability over a wide range of computational parameters. An asynchronous calculation strategy is adopted to further improve the computing efficiency. The method was firstly applicated to the simulation of sedimentation of a single particle and a pair of particles after good validations in cases of the flow past a fixed cylinder and particle migration in a Couette flow against FEM and FVM methods. The determination of the asynchronous calculation strategy and the effect of viscoelastic stress distribution on the settling behaviors of one and two particles are revealed. Subsequently, 504 particles settling in a closed cavity was simulated and the phenomenon that the viscoelastic stress stabilizing the Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities was observed. At last, simulations of a dense flow involving 11001 particles, the largest number of particles to date, were performed to investigate the instability behavior induced by elastic effect under hydrodynamic interactions in a viscoelastic fluid. The elasticity-induced ordering of the particle structures and fluid bubble structures in this dense flow is revealed for the first time. These simulations demonstrate the capability and prospects of the present method for aid in understanding the complex behaviors of viscoelastic particle suspensions.