New fuel air control strategy for reducing NOx emissions from corner-fired utility boilers at medium-low loads

Due to the rapidly growing renewable power, the fossil fuel power plants have to be increasingly operated under large and rapid load change conditions, which can induce various challenges. This work aims to reduce NOx emissions of large-scale corner-fired boilers operated at medium–low loads. The combustion characteristics and NOx emissions from a 1000 MWe corner-fired tower boiler under different loads are investigated experimentally and numerically. A new control strategy for the annular fuel air is proposed and implemented in the boiler, in which the secondary air admitted to the furnace through the air annulus around each coal nozzle tip is controlled by the boiler load, instead of being controlled by the output of the connected mill as commonly used in this kind of power plant. Both the experimental and simulation results show that the new control strategy reduces NOx emissions at the entrance of the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system by about 20% at medium–low loads, compared to those based on the original control. The new control strategy has also been successfully applied to two other corner-fired boilers to achieve a significant NOx emission reduction at partial loads. In all three applications, no negative effect on the combustion and steam temperature characteristics of the boilers is observed.