CHARACTERISTICS OF A FLUIDIZED-BED INCINERATOR FOR THE COMBUSTION OF SOLID-WASTES

A laboratory-scale fluidized-bed incinerator has been designed for the efficient combustion and thermal destruction of solid waste materials. The experimental facility consists of a 153 mm dia cylindrical furnace, a propane gas burner, an air supply system, batch and continuous feeders, an off-gas cleanup system, flue-gas analyzer system, and an on-line automated data recording and analysis system. A continuous monitoring of temperature and pressure distributions in the incinerator, and composition of the flue gas is possible. Characteristics of the incinerator have been established. These include measurement of pressure drops across the calming and bed sections as a function of superficial air velocity and temperature, and axial temperature distribution in the test bed. Hydrodynamic characteristics of three inert sand beds of average diameters 641, 1312 and 2165 mum have been investigated by recording the pressure-drop histories in the lower and upper regions of the bed as a function of fluidization number and bed temperature. Several statistical functions such as variance of the pressure-drop data, probability density function, skewness, kurtosis, autocorrelation function and probability density function have been computed, and the same have been related to the fluidization quality of the bed. These investigations suggest the optimum conditions for incineration of waste materials where the gas solid contacting and solids mixing is most favorable, and hence, best results will be obtained for thermal destruction and pollution control.