SIMULATION MODEL OF A SEMI-INDUSTRIAL FUEL OIL BOILER

The model developed within this work is a model which simulates the performance in steady-state
regime of an industrial fuel oil boiler equipped with a two firing rate burner. To simplify
calculations, the model uses two parameters which were fitted from experimental results. A
literature review was first performed in order to get the most suitable correlations for the gas and
water flows in the heat exchangers. The comparison of simulation and experimental results shows
that, in general, gas temperature at the exhaust of the combustion chamber is predicted within the
measurement uncertainty at high firing rate. The error on gas temperature at the boiler stack is
below 10K and the power transferred to the water is also well estimated (below 2% of error) for
both firing rates. The model was validated with complementary tests at low and high firing rates.
The results show that gas temperatures and the useful effect are within the measurements
uncertainty. The validity of the model is restricted to fuel mass flow rates around the nominal flow
rates.