Emissions from a Domestic Wood Heating Appliance: Experimental Measurements and Numerical Study Using an Equivalent Reactor Network (ERN) Approach Coupled with a Detailed Chemical Mechanism

Dwindling fossil fuel reserves and global climate change drive researchers to discover and develop new strategies to derive energy from renewable sources, such as biomass, including wood. However, when poorly controlled, wood burning can be a source of atmospheric pollution. With the ultimate purpose of better controlling pollutant emissions from domestic small combustion installations, this paper follows two objectives. First, temperature and pollutant measurements obtained at the chimney outlet of a domestic inset fed with wood logs and working under nominal operating conditions are presented. Measured pollutants include CO, CO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx), monoaromatic, carbonyl, and phenolic compounds, as well as polycyclic-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and sugars with measurement made using different types of wood. Second, this paper describes a first attempt of modeling based on a detailed chemistry and tests it for simulating the measured pollutants. The model includes a previously developed detailed chemical kinetic mechanism and a simplified model of thermal transfer in the wood log. A network of ideal reactors (equivalent reactor network (ERN)), for which simulations using the detailed kinetic model are feasible, is proposed to represent both the primary pyrolysis and the combustion of the emitted gaseous species. With only adjusting the parameters used in the model in order to simulate the smoke temperature and the CO2 mole fraction for a single batch well, simulations give a reasonably good order of magnitude for all of the measured pollutants for the seven used wood batches. A sensitivity analysis of the used parameters and of the structure of the ERN model is also presented.