The ash produced upon coal combustion adversely impacts the thermal performance of electricity-generating facilities by decreasing conversion efficiency and increasing operating and maintenance costs. Currently, power plant operators do not have the advanced tools to assess online the potential impacts and respond to changes in coal characteristics in order to minimize ash-related problems. Over the past several decades, the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) has focused on understanding the impacts of coal quality, plant design, and operating conditions on ash formation and deposition.

This course provided information on the inorganic composition of coal, ash transformations during combustion, ash deposit formation, and predictive methods. This information will assist in identifying coal characteristics and operating conditions that minimize the impact of ash on plant performance. In addition, the results of recently developed predictive tools were presented. The EERC has created and upgraded a suite of ash predictive model components from mineral characterization to ash deposition. These critical model components were successfully combined with a detailed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to assess the effects of ash behavior on the daily operation of a power plant.