ABSTRACT
Materials such as biomass and waste are solid fuels in their own right, but of low calorific value, of variable composition, and requiring special low-intensity combustion conditions. The combustion of pulverized biomass and mixtures with coal is different from the cases involving fixed beds, because most of the existing power plants are designed as pulverized-fuel plants. Extensive experiments in test rigs and plant have been made to investigate the behavior of blended fuels in pulverized-fuel combustion. The atomization stage is the most critical part of the process of coal-water slurry combustion, since both ignition delay and combustion efficiency are dependent upon the size of the droplets in the spray. The combustion of coal-water slurries in fluidized-bed combustors appears to be a very simple technique for a number of reasons. Finely divided coal resulting from processing or coal-cleaning operations can be agglomerated into larger particles that are called fuel briquettes and that are largely used only for domestic applications.
