Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling of a Self-Recuperative Burner and Development of a Simplified Equivalent Radiative Model

The solution for dynamic modeling of reheating furnaces requires a burner model, which is simultaneously accurate and fast. Based on the fact that radiative heat transfer is the most dominant heat transfer mode in high-temperature processes, the present study develops a simplified flame representation model that can be used for dynamic simulation of heat transfer in reheating furnaces. The first part of the paper investigates, experimentally and computationally, gas combustion in an industrial burner. Experiments aim at establishing an experimental database of the burner characteristics. This database is compared with numerical simulations in order to establish a numerical model for the burner. The numerical burner model was solved using a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software (FLUENT 6.3.26). A selection of results is presented, highlighting the usefulness of CFD as a modeling tool for industrial scale burners. In the second part of the paper, a new approach called the “emissive volume approach” is established. This approach consists of replacing the burner flame by a number of emissive volumes that replicates the radiative effect of the flame. Comparisons with CFD results show a difference smaller than 1% is achieved with the emissive volume approach, while computational time is divided by 40.