Effectiveness of Rotary Air Preheater in a Thermal Power Plant

Energy saving is one of the key issues, not only from the viewpoint of fuel consumption but also for the protection of global environment. Large quantity of hot flue gases is released from boilers, kilns, ovens and furnaces. If some of this waste heat could be recovered, a considerable amount of primary fuel could be saved. One of the efforts has been made for heat recovery in Thermal Power Plants using rotary regenerators. The present study is on the performance analysis of rotary air preheater in a Thermal power plant. In this thesis, the performance of air preheater is evaluated based on the operating conditions such as mass flow rate and temperature of both air and flue gases. In this analysis the variation of Reynolds number, Colburn j factor and, Friction factor at the operating conditions are studied. The effectiveness of the air preheater is evaluated using Kays and London correlation and compared with the counter flow heat exchanger at the same operating conditions of air preheater. The variation of pressure drop, heat transfer coefficient, and heat transfer rate at different mass flow rate of air observed.