SIMULATION MODEL OF A SEMI-INDUSTRIAL FUEL OIL BOILER

peer reviewedThe model developed within this work is a model which simulates the performance in steady-state regime of an industrial fuel oil boiler equipped with a two firing rate burner. To simplify calculations, the model uses two parameters which were fitted from experimental results. A literature review was first performed in order to get the most suitable correlations for the gas and water flows in the heat exchangers. The comparison of simulation and experimental results shows that, in general, gas temperature at the exhaust of the combustion chamber is predicted within the measurement uncertainty at high firing rate. The error on gas temperature at the boiler stack is below 10K and the power transferred to the water is also well estimated (below 2% of error) for both firing rates. The model was validated with complementary tests at low and high firing rates. The results show that gas temperatures and the useful effect are within the measurements uncertainty. The validity of the model is restricted to fuel mass flow rates around the nominal flow rates