ITEA FLAMELESS TECHNOLOGY

Log-in to access to the reserved area.
Not registered yet? click for an account

ITEA is a company of the
Sofinter group. Visit Sofinter site

Combustion technology has always set flame technologies as research highways. Over the past fifty years the power generation industry, and other manufacturing sectors like refinery, petrochemical etc., have been carrying out an impressive sequence of development steps in the field of flames to improve energy efficiency and to reduce pollutants and by-products. Indeed today’s Jet flames technology incorporates the most advanced devices and solutions that sophisticated fluid-dynamic models can suggest. A parallel race is taking place in terms of ever more stringent regulations concerning the control of combustion pollutants that impact negatively on both humans and the environment. Novel sensors are lowering the detection limits of noxious species by many orders of magnitude, giving rise to new concerns and the projection of new regulations.

The exploration of the nano-particle (particles below 1 micron size) has drawn attention to soot i.e. the condensation particles of pyrogenic species present in the fumes of gas fuels like methane. Indeed, investigations into the nano-particle field will drive the attention of regulators towards heavy metals.
More stringent emission-limits and/or taxation penalties are already being projected for application to NOx and CO2. Furthermore, the present and future evolution of oil prices on a worldwide-scale is triggering the issue of lower ranking, low-cost fuels, that will introduce problems of an even more fundamental nature in order to comply with high efficiency and pollution control demands.

Nevertheless, the fields operable with the established fundamental tools that secured the past success of flames are shrinking due to the lower permitted emissions and the use of flexible fuels. Boundary improvements today require huge development costs, and higher capital per unit power.
Indeed, the decision of whether to continue along traditional flame research highways, confining the emerging issues to post-treatment fumes technologies, or to move to alternative combustion technologies is becoming a matter of great debate.

Flames are per se dominated by catastrophic (non linear) parameters, and, are therefore intrinsically chaotic, each elemental domain being a separate entity and averaging the mean flame forefront only statistically. The reduction of nasty by-products (soot, dioxins, furans), as well as NOx and CO/CO2, seems bound to the fate of each and every single element combustion domain.
An important step outside traditional flames was marked by Wuenning et al. in 1992, who demonstrated that by decoupling some steep flame parameter gradients e.g. oxygen concentration and temperature, combustion could take place in a loose and “mild” way throughout the entire “volume” of the combustor. Thus, “flameless” combustion was born.

Conceptually, flameless combustion is completely opposite that of flames. It represents a quantum leap in emission reduction: no soot, a hundred times less PAH (polyaromatics), ten times less NOx, lower CO/CO2.