Team

Reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to limit global warming is one of the greatest challenges of our time. The transformation of the energy industry is ongoing towards carbon-free or carbon neutral energy sources. While renewable energy sources like solar and wind power suffer from short- and long-term fluctuations, biomass combustion can produce large amounts of power and heat independent of seasonal and weather conditions.

Applying carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to biomass combustion will result in carbon-negative emissions and therefore biomass energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has a great potential to even reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. One promising concept to efficiently capture and store CO2 after the combustion process is burning biomass in an oxyfuel atmosphere. Thereby large amounts of exhaust gases consisting mostly of CO2 and H2O are recirculated into the combustion chamber and pure oxygen is added.

The replacement of N2 by CO2 and H2O in an oxyfuel atmosphere strongly influences the combustion. Different temperature and velocity profiles as well as combustion instabilities can be observed. For a detailed understanding of the chemical and physical processes the SFB/Transregio 129 Oxyflame, which is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), was set up in 2013. Its vision is to develop methods and models to achieve „predictive engineering“ as a design tool for the engineering of burners and boilers with oxyfuel combustion.