Municipal solid waste incineration in a packed bed: A comprehensive modelling study with experimental validation

Billion tons of municipal solid wastes are produced each year globally. Incineration of the solid wastes has many advantages over landfilling and gains enormous attention worldwide, in which packed bed combustion technology is widely used. In this paper, a comprehensive model is developed to simulate solid waste incineration in a packed bed and then validated by a detailed experimental study. For the given case, both the pyrolysis and gas combustion front and the subsequent char oxidation front propagate from the bed surface to the grate due to the abundant oxygen availability in the bed. After experimental validation, a model-based parametric study is performed, showing that large particles tend to delay ignition but promote burnout while low operation pressures can remarkably delay burnout of a packed bed. The model can be readily and reliably integrated in computational fluid dynamics simulation of industrial solid waste incinerators for design and operation optimization.