MODELING CHAR OXIDATION AS A FUNCTION OF PRESSURE ...
MODELING CHAR OXIDATION AS A FUNCTION OF PRESSURE ...
MODELING CHAR OXIDATION AS A FUNCTION OF PRESSURE ...
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Bulk Diffusion vs. Knudsen Diffusion<br />
During the course of this study, Sun and Hurt (1999) incorporated the<br />
effectiveness factor into CBK to account for Zone I/II transition. However, m-th order<br />
kinetics was still used to describe the carbon-oxygen reaction and the reaction order is<br />
somewhat arbitrarily assumed to be 0.5, implying an apparent reaction order of 0.75.<br />
Transport to the particle interior was believed to occur primarily through large feeder<br />
pores in which diffusion occurs in or near molecular regime (Simons, 1983). The<br />
transport limitations to the interior through large feeder pores were the primary interest<br />
of Sun and Hurt (1999) and are described explicitly to predict the influence of particle<br />
diameter on overall rate as these transport limitation occurs over the whole particle length<br />
scale. It was believed that the effects of diffusion limitations in micropores could be<br />
absorbed into the intrinsic surface rate coefficient (Galavas, 1980). With these<br />
simplifying assumptions, the effective diffusivity for transport to the particle interior is<br />
modeled as:<br />
D e = D AB f M / (5.18)<br />
where f M is the fraction of the total porosity in feeder pores (that is M = f M ), and f M/<br />
can be treated as a single empirical parameter. This method may be sufficient for char<br />
oxidation at atmospheric pressure, but the disadvantage of this method is obvious for<br />
modeling char oxidation over wide range of total pressure: the molecular diffusivity is<br />
inversely proportional to total pressure, while Knudsen diffusivity is independent of<br />
total pressure, therefore molecular diffusion becomes more important as total pressure<br />
increases. In addition, absorbing the effects of transport limitations in micropores into<br />
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