Coal combustion analysis tool in coal fired power plant for slagging and fouling guidelines

Coal remains as one of the major sources of energy in power plant industry. Optimizing the coal combustion in power plant will improve its efficiency and lead to reduction of greenhouse gases in flue gas. One of the main objectives in coal combustion research is the development of techniques to help power plant operators utilize coal cleanly and efficiently. At the same time, power plant operators would like to maintain slagging and fouling inside the boiler to be as minimum as possible to ensure optimize combustion process and maintain its cleanliness. Maximum heat absorption inside the boiler can be achieved through clean boiler tube surface. Slagging and fouling factor for every coal type can be used as an early indication to power plant engineer regarding the overall coal behavior. The slagging and fouling factor are obtained from coal combustion analysis calculation. Coal combustion analysis is a tool to facilitate power plant engineer in predicting the impact of individual or blended coal quality on power plant performance. It will give early prediction on boiler combustion performance related to the coal quality and surely will assist the power plant operators preparing for boiler process control such as soot blower regime, mill outlet temperature setpoint, boiler excess air control and burner control through tilting or auxiliary air dampers adjustment. The boiler process control will ensure the combustion will not have any adverse effect to the boiler. This paper will also discuss about slagging and fouling factor of different coal type which are used as designs for a boiler in one coal fired power plant in Malaysia. Further analysis were also conducted, based on several case studies where different coal types are blended to acquire better slagging and fouling factors compared to individual coal.