Incineration of Cattle

Neil Barton

I am looking into running a CFD simulation of a secondary chamber of an incinerator that is used for disposing of the bodies of infected cows.

The incinerator comprises a primary chamber, in which the cows are burnt, initially with some help from gas burners. They then burn under their own steam (if you pardon the pun). Volatiles and water vapour from the cows pass into a secondary chamber that is maintained at about 1000 deg C before exhausting to the atmosphere. What I want to do is predict the residence time of the gas in this secondary chamber.

I appreciate the complexity of this problem, but it must be possible to estimate the amount of carbon, hydrogen, etc in a cow and hence approximate the volatiles released and the energy released as they combust. We do have some test data from a similar incinerator to help us here.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how this can be done? Are there any references out there on similar topics? It occurs to me that someone must have looked at combustion of similarly complex biological materials (Fluent includes wood combustion information in its database). Also, I'd be interested in any comparisons between CFD derived residence times and test data for incinerators and other vessels.

Thanks,

Neil