Oxygen Enhanced Combustion in a Cement Rotary Kiln: Clean Industrial Combustion Case Study

Decreasing NOx emissions is becoming increasingly important as it has many lifechanging implications on humanity and nature. In this work several models were constructed to simulate the combustion of methane in a cement rotary kiln, and it was investigated whether oxygen-enhanced combustion leads to less NOx production for the obtained models. This was done using the Cantera software package with Python. Starting off with a single zero-dimensional reactor equipped with a reduced one-step global reaction mechanism, which was expanded to include two-step and four-step reaction mechanisms. Combustion inside this homogeneous reactor was simulated for various stoichiometric conditions for an initial temperature of 1000K. Subsequently, a one-dimensional model of chained reactors to simulate flow was considered, equipped with both the two-step and four-step mechanisms. This was realized using the scalar convection-diffusion equation to compute the flow throughout the reactor. All aforementioned models were adjusted to replace air with oxygen-enhanced air, containing higher levels of oxygen for every iteration. The simulatedtemperature evolution was examined using the exponential relationship of temperature and thermal NOx.Applied Mathematic