Numerical Study on Heat Transfer Characteristics of Regenerative Thermal Oxidizers

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the influences of the primary designing and operating parameters on heat transfer characteristics and the performance of regenerative thermal oxidizers. One-dimensional model and no heat loss of the walls are proposed to simulate temperature profiles of the media bed and outlet gas with different design and operating parameters. The numerical results show that the temperatures of the outlet gas and media beds vary with time during heating and cooling processes at the convergent condition. The cycle duration has minor influence on the outlet gas temperature and thermal recovery efficiency of the regenerative thermal oxidizers. Moreover, the mass flow rate and ball size have considerable impacts on thermal recovery efficiency. The smaller the mass flow rate and ball diameter are, the better the thermal recovery efficiency is achieved. The results also show that the bed length should be long enough (~2.5 m) to achieve high thermal recovery efficiency (>94%). The proposed simple model can be useful for engineers to quickly predict heat transfer characteristics of industrial regenerative thermal oxidizer systems during a designing process.