Optimization of Combustion Burner at Hoffman Brick Factories

The combustion system used by the Hoffman furnaces for brick factories has a very low efficiency. In the current paper, the performance of the combustion system of Hoffman furnaces of Kolet Pottery Brick Co has improved, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) by making changes to the Hoffman furnace torch, including the converging the torch head, inserting the spring in the pipe to create the swirl flow, shortening the nozzle length for the better mixing of the fuel and air, and more. The changes were simulated in each step with the FLUENT simulation software. Based on the theoretical results and simulation, optimized torch was made and a field test was carried out on it in a brick factory and the gases from their combustion were analyzed. As a result of these reforms, the combustion efficiency of the Hoffman furnaces has increased from 27% to 47 %, and consumption of fuel oil has decreased by a third. Also, the CO value of 16854 ppm in the old torch was reduced to 298 ppm in the optimized torch and the NO value ranged from 49 to 18 ppm as a result of optimizations.