Emissions from a Domestic Wood Heating Appliance: Experimental Measurements and Numerical Study Using an Equivalent Reactor Network (ERN) Approach Coupled with a Detailed Chemical Mechanism

Dwindling
fossil fuel reserves and global climate change drive
researchers to discover and develop new strategies to derive energy
from renewable sources, such as biomass, including wood. However,
when poorly controlled, wood burning can be a source of atmospheric
pollution. With the ultimate purpose of better controlling pollutant
emissions from domestic small combustion installations, this paper
follows two objectives. First, temperature and pollutant measurements
obtained at the chimney outlet of a domestic inset fed with wood logs
and working under nominal operating conditions are presented. Measured
pollutants include CO, CO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx), monoaromatic,
carbonyl, and phenolic compounds, as well as polycyclic-aromatic hydrocarbons
(PAHs) and sugars with measurement made using different types of wood.
Second, this paper describes a first attempt of modeling based on
a detailed chemistry and tests it for simulating the measured pollutants.
The model includes a previously developed detailed chemical kinetic
mechanism and a simplified model of thermal transfer in the wood log.
A network of ideal reactors (equivalent reactor network (ERN)), for
which simulations using the detailed kinetic model are feasible, is
proposed to represent both the primary pyrolysis and the combustion
of the emitted gaseous species. With only adjusting the parameters
used in the model in order to simulate the smoke temperature and the
CO2 mole fraction for a single batch well, simulations
give a reasonably good order of magnitude for all of the measured
pollutants for the seven used wood batches. A sensitivity analysis
of the used parameters and of the structure of the ERN model is also
presented.