Development of an incinerator bed model for municipal solid waste incineration

The growing awareness and concern over environmental problems associated wi th landfill has led to increased demand for incinerators to dispose of muni cipal waste. The design of an efficient incinerator requires fundamental kn owledge of grate combustion and grate mixing, but for such a complex combus tion problem, there has been no satisfactory model of the system as a whole . An experimental fixed bed reactor was used to investigate the incineratio n of simulated waste. Measurements of temperatures and gas compositions wer e made at several positions within the refuse bed. A mathematical model for combustion of the solid waste in a travelling grate incinerator was develo ped based on an unsteady-state static bed model. The predictions from the m odel were investigated and compared to the combustion experimental data car ried out in the batch fixed bed incinerator. Although several simplifying a ssumptions were made during the model development, the final functional for m of the predicted data corresponds relatively well with the measured data.