Efficiency and safety are crucial requirements of any thermal process. Inefficient operations can quickly lead to excessive energy costs, and can increase the thermal loads on components, as well as the risk of failure. Synergetics engineers can gain a detailed understanding of thermal physics deep inside an operating procedure by using computer modeling. This enables them to test sensitivities and identify and remedy deficiencies.
Figure 1: Temperature distribution within the primary combustion chamber of a waste incinerator. The fuel jet is injected on the left hand side.
Synergetics has experience with a wide range of thermal processes including:
- combustion inside a multiple hearth furnace, including modelling pyrolysis, gasification and multi-step combustion chemistry reactions within the turbulent gas flow. We achieved high-accuracy validation against onsite measurements and identified avenues to reduce products of incomplete combustion and minimize gas burner use;
- optimisation of a multistage, high temperature hazardous and clinical waste incinerator with both primary and secondary combustion chambers;
- environmental approvals for stack emissions from waste-to energy and waste incineration considering a wide range of impacts including dioxins, furans, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide;
- specification of necessary pollution control devices to treat flue exhaust gasses from combined heat and power generators to meet regulatory limits;
- heat exchanger design optimisation and modelling to ensure performance requirements were met;
- thermal storage tank optimisation to optimise building heating and cooling costs;
- radiation, conduction and convection heat transfer analysis to optimise the heat balance within systems;
- thermal lancing and smelting simulations to optimise performance and reduce energy usage;
- modelling of ground flares to assess risk and design protective solutions; and
- cooling tower and stack emissions modelling to quantify and limit for environmental exposures.
Figure 2: Density contours at three instances during a thermal lancing operation. The growing bubble of hot gas (blue) builds up at the thermal lance tip, and then rises up in an energetic, unstable manner.