The development of iron powder boilers for industrial use
Niek van Rooij defended his PhD thesis at the Department of Mechanical Engineering on February 28th.
The energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources requires additional energy carriers besides the ones that are now being used. Iron powder has a lot of potential as a recyclable energy carrier. Stored energy in iron powder can be released during combustion without releasing any CO2. The iron oxides that are produced during combustion can be captured and converted back to iron using hydrogen. That makes this a useful recyclable energy source. Niek van Rooij explores in his PhD research how to scale up the combustion of iron powder to make it applicable for industrial processes.
Iron combustion has been tested a lot in labs, but to make iron powder a useful energy source for industry a high temperature heat is needed. This high temperature can be reached by not only scaling the iron combustion itself, but by also implementing a steam boiler and a separation and capturing system for the produced iron oxides. experimented with this during his PhD research.
Improving the recovery of iron
The first step of the research revolved around the testing of a 100 kW demonstrator developed by EMGroup BV, Heat Power, Romico Engineering Solutions BV, Team Solid, Metalot and 果冻传媒. Niek van Rooij developed various measurement methods during these tests. Based on that he proposed several design changes to, amongst others, improve the recovery of iron. This crucial improvement of the cyclicity of the process enabled an increase of the duration of testing from 30 minutes to 9 hours.
Iron powder boiler
Next to that a boiler was integrated into the iron powder combustion chamber and a heat exchanger was installed to capture heat. This makes it possible to generate more heat with iron powder combustion. The implementation of these design changes resulted in an improved demonstrator with a burner power of 500 kW. This is a first step in making iron combustion usable on a big scale in industry.
Title of PhD thesis: . Promotor: Prof. Philip de Goey and Prof. Michael Golombok. Co-promotor: Dr. Guy Willems.