OPERATING EXPERIENCE WITH OPTIMELT™ REGENERATIVE THERMO-CHEMICAL HEAT RECOVERY FOR OXY-FUEL FIRED GLASS FURNACES

摘要

The operation of glass furnaces with oxy-fuel combustion in combination with advanced heat recovery is a compelling low-cost solution. Praxair has developed and demonstrated a regenerative heat recovery system for oxy-fuel fired furnaces that use regenerators in a similar way to which conventional regenerators are used for air preheating. The OPTIMELT™ Thermo-Chemical Regenerator (TCR) technology stores waste heat from the hot flue gas and uses this energy to reform a mixture of natural gas and recirculated flue gas to hot syngas. The natural gas reacts endothermically in the hot checker pack with the water vapor and CO_2 in the recycled flue gas, forming H_2 and CO as a hot syngas fuel and resulting in efficient thermo-chemical heat recovery. This novel technology for heat recovery was successfully installed on a 50 t/d commercial container glass furnace in the summer of 2014 and has been operated in daily production since then. In addition to a positive impact on production and quality, the TCR system successfully reduced natural gas and oxygen consumption by 15 to 18% relative to the oxy-fuel baselines depending on glass type and cullet rate. This paper summarizes the extensive operating experience with the installation and includes operational data, glass quality, and emission results.