Combustion Technology

Combustion Technology | Combustion Research Facility | High-Temperature Drop-Tube Furnace

For over 35 years, Southern Research has performed extensive fundamental and applied research in the area of combustion, including reaction kinetics and modeling, halogen's effects on combustion, and development of advanced combustion technologies development, such as reburning, low-NOx firing (with both flame and furnace staging), catalytic combustion, oxy-firing, and solid fuel (coal, biomass, waste) blending.

Southern Research has a diversity of experimental equipment for performing both fundamental and applied combustion testing. Small-scale combustion experiments can be performed in our High-Temperature Drop-Tube Furnace or in bench-top flame experiments, or in small muffle furnaces or other laboratory-scale test equipment. These fundamental tests can be used to answer specific questions about a particular circumstance or they can allow data collection from which fundamental rate constants and kinetic models can be derived.

The Combustion Research Facility was developed specifically for applied research relative to full-scale power plants. Since the facility was built in 1990, it has been used extensively to perform larger-scale fundamental and applied research relative to combustion and air-pollution control technologies. While the Combustion Research Facility was specifically designed to fire the wide range of coal types used in the fleet of coal-fired boilers across the United States, it has also been effective for testing natural-gas-fired technologies and biomass-cofiring, and waste-incineration technologies.

Combustion Technology | Combustion Research Facility | High-Temperature Drop-Tube Furnace