About heat flux evaluation in MSW furnace combustion-afterburning chambers systems

A method is presented to evaluate the heat flux in combustion–afterburning chamber systems of water-tube MSW furnace with stoker feed. The method starts discretizing the furnace into cells, assigning the MSW bed temperature distribution on stoker and assuming an initial temperature distribution for gas and walls. The physical model leads to the net heat flux calculation for every boundary partition wall in the chambers, by evaluating view factors and thermoradiative properties of gas-particulated medium; a linear equations system is obtained and its resolution determines the thermal power released by the surfaces, from which it is possible to achieve the heat flux values. The temperature distribution for gas and surfaces, as well as the heat fluxes are obtained, with very good precision, by an iterative process, the correlation between calculated values and main furnace design parameters being highlighted. The method is applied referring to two MSW samples.