Industrial & Combustion Processes


From its beginning, the CRF has studied coal combustion. Early work applied laser diagnostics and computational modeling to combustion in coal-fired systems. More recent work has concentrated on the behavior of mineral impurities in coal and cofiring coal and biomass. Biomass fuels such as wood chips, black liquor, and straw have been investigated.

Industries, such as glass, steel, and chemicals rely on high-temperature manufacturing processes. Understanding, monitoring, predicting, and controlling these processes is the key to improving process efficiency and the products themselves. The CRF's work ranges from fundamental theoretical and experimental research to applied modeling and demonstration experiments.

Projects undertaken by CRF researchers have included:

• Creating chemical and temperature sensors for the steel and chemical industries
• Controlling erosion in oxygen-fired glass furnaces
• Rapid monitoring of hydrogen in process streams
• Furthering fundamental understanding of the chemistry of chemical vapor deposition

The CRF also maintains the Thermodynamics Resource, a repository of thermochemical data for gas- and condensed-phase systems relevant to materials processing, combustion, and corrosion.