Cyclone Furnace to burn sawdust residues from Amazon wood industries.

Motivation Only the Par State has 553 sawmill industries. This number grows fast when is added sawmills from others six states that form the Brazilian Amazon region. The wood efficiency of those plants is 55%; it means that 45% is residue. One can easily realize that after some days of operation, the amount of residue at the plant area is so large that needs to be disposal. Due the existing infra-structure, most of those companies prefer burn the residues in an open environment or use it somewhere as a landfill. The environment protection agency is enforcing the law and applying heavy fines to those industries that dont deal with their residues properly. These brought financial instability to the sector, which is looking for technological solution that allows them to burn correctly their residue in a cheap way.

The first adopted solution was to built furnaces as the one showed above. They are very expensive and the combustion occurs without control, therefore their emissions dont attend the present regulation. Finally, cyclone filters are built to clean the exhaustion gases increasing the cost of those equipments. The cost of this system is so high that only large companies are able to afford the investment. Medium and small companies need a cheaper solution to give feasibility to their business. The Project The research group where that I am working with, Energy, Biomass and Environment (EBMA in Portuguese), www.cultura.ufpa.br/ebma received a grant from the Brazilian national research council, CNPq, the amount of ~US$100k to develop in two years (2005 and 2006) a cyclone furnace which has a controlled combustion, very compact, cheap and their emissions must attend the legislation. The goal is to destroy, and only destroy, efficiently sawdust through combustion. Once after this goal has been achieved, others processes to use the heat released can be considered. I received the coordination of this project and we putted together a team of three more PhD (Daniel, numerical simulation; Danielle, experimentalist; Guto Brasil, simulation and gases analysis), a senior MSc. (Gonalo, construction and operation), three M.Sc. students and three undergraduate students. Three other Brazilian Universities are given support to us in this project: University of So Paulo (computational), University of Campinas (experimental) and University of Brasilia (computational and experimental). We came out with the following proposal.

Research strategy We decided to follow two paths simultaneously. We run a computational simulation for the reactive flow in the furnace using a CFD code. The code chosen was the Fluent. The objective here is to develop a tool which allows optimizing the furnace physical parameters such that the chemical kinetic is able to be completed in favorable condition and only CO2, H2O and ash came out of the furnace. In order to validate the computational code, we decide to construct and instrument a cyclone furnace, where gases temperature measurements can be done as well as sample of inside gases can be extracted and analyzed. The following furnace was built.

Available equipments to make measurements are: Concentration of species, Greenline 8000, electrolytic cells and infrared, pressure, velocity; Tempest 100, electrolytic cell; thermocouples type S; chromatograph; Isocinetic collector for particulate. Pitot to measure air inflow rate. The apparatus is able to vary the air and biomass flow rate and our lab is able to characterize the biomass (Immediate analysis). All data is recorded online in a central computer. Actual status So far we had run the furnace for 45h. Only the inside gas temperature profile at the wall was measured and the results are very promising. The furnace is 4.0 m height and 0.8 m insidediameter. It was able to burn 200 kg/h of sawdust and the gas achieves the temperature of 1600 C. Our near future plans is to make temperature, and species measurements of the gases at the exit of the furnace with different mass and air flow rate in order to identify what maximum flow rates such that the combustion is completed. We also want to make measurements of radial profiles for species concentration, temperature and pressure, and compare them with the results already obtained from the calculation with the Fluent. Acknowledgement to the CNPq for their financial support through. Process 401105/2004-0.