Measurement of Pulverized Wood Pellet Flame Temperature using Optical Pyrometry in Lab-scale Burner

Abstract

As increasing energy consumption, fossil fuels are on the brink of being exhausted and climate change occurs. Korea government adopts RPS (Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard) which deals with above problems in 2012. According to RPS programs, all the power corporation have to use renewable resources for 2 percent of total electric generation in 2012, and 10 percent of total power generation in 2022. Many power corporations adopt wood pellet power generation system because wood pellet is carbon neutral resource and weight factor of wood pellet is 2 in Korea RPS programs. However, fundamental research on wood pellet flame or combustion has not been performed sufficiently. In this study, we measured two dimensional temperature distribution of lab-scale pulverized wood pellet flame using two-color optical pyrometer. We calibrated optical system with tungsten filament lamp. To achieve the wood pellet flame in lab-scale burner, pulverized wood pellet particles were pre-heated and ignited by methane-air flat flame, where the particles were supplied by using a syringe pump and pneumatic vibrator. Finally, we could estimate two dimensional temperature field of the wood pellet flame by combining the calibration results and the signals from the flame.