Incinerator gases

Incineration. Gases sufftciendy concentrated to support combustion are burned in waste-heat boilers, dares, or used for fuel. Typical pollutants treated by incineration are hydrocarbons, other organic solvents and blowdown gases, H2S, HCN, CO, H2, NH, and mercaptans. VOC... 

Common oil and coal combustions add pollution to the atmosphere. Sulphuric acid is a main factor in acid precipitation. Both industrial production and ordinary consumption are responsible for this t)q)e of pollution. In addition to sulphuric acid we also find some nitric acid in the precipitation. Both sulphur and nitrogen are vital plant nutrition elements. As a rule the plants will find sulphur enough in the soil but lack sufficient nitrogen sources. Many other elements are included in the incinerating gases. 

Tritium occurs most commonly in water as water itself (HTO). Except for radiological monitoring purposes, the main reason for determining tritium in water is to assess whether the supply is being replenished by rainfall or not. As mentioned earlier, tritiated organic compounds, usually insoluble, are used commercially mainly in luminous equipment or in medicine and research. Such material may eventually end up in tip leachates, effluents and incinerator gases. 

The incineration of liquid and solid wastes produces gases with a variety of potential corrosives present. Usually they are some combination of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur oxides and some hydrogen fluoride, but the primary contaminant is almost always hydrogen chloride. The exact composition oftentimes is variable and unpredictable in any one incinerator. Before incineration gases can be vented, they must be scrubbed of these noxious pollutants. 

Water. Scrubbed Sewage Sludge Incinerator Gases — E — e ... 

Optimized modern dry scrubbing systems for incinerator gas cleaning are much more effective (and expensive) than their counterparts used so far for utility boiler flue gas cleaning. Brinckman and Maresca [ASME Med. Waste Symp. (1992)] describe the use of dry hydrated lime or sodium bicarbonate injection followed by membrane filtration as preferred treatment technology for control of acid gas and particulate matter emissions from modular medical waste incinerators, which have especially high dioxin emissions. 

Thermal incinerators (gas-fired afterburners or catalytic afterburners) None... 

Particle size distribution relating to gas cleaning is well understood in the industry. This section deals with general rules of thumb. Certain important issues not included in this section are flue gas desulfurization, flue gas denitrification, hazardous waste gas cleaning, waste incineration gas cleaning, and removal of CO2 from flue gas. All these topics have special requirements, which must be considered separately in the design process. 

These may be horizontal or vertical shell boilers or watertube boilers. They would be designed to suit individual applications ranging through gases from furnaces, incinerators, gas turbines and diesel exhausts. The prime requirement is that the waste gases must contain sufficient usable heat to produce steam or hot water at the condition required. 

Depending on the mix of waste being burnt, the incinerator may or may not require auxiliary firing from fuel oil or natural gas. 

The policy for waste heat recovery from the flue gas varies between incinerator operators. Incinerators located on the waste producer s site tend to be fitted with waste heat recovery systems, usually steam generation, which is fed into the site steam mains. Merchant incinerator operators, who incinerate other people s waste and... 

If air is used as stripping agent, further treatment of the stripped material will be necessary. The gas might be fed to an incinerator or some attempt made to recover material by use of adsorption. 

Tail gas containing traces of SO2, H2S, COS and CS2 are usually sent to a finishing processing before being incinerated. 

Compounds having low vapor pressures at room temperature are treated in water-cooled or air-cooled condensers, but more volatile materials often requite two-stage condensation, usually water cooling followed by refrigeration. Minimising noncondensable gases reduces the need to cool to extremely low dew points. Partial condensation may suffice if the carrier gas can be recycled to the process. Condensation can be especially helpful for primary recovery before another method such as adsorption or gas incineration. Both surface condensers, often of the finned coil type, and direct-contact condensers are used. Direct-contact condensers usually atomize a cooled, recirculated, low vapor pressure Hquid such as water into the gas. The recycle hquid is often cooled in an external exchanger. 

A wide variety of special-purpose incinerators (qv) with accompanying gas scmbbers and soHd particle collectors have been developed and installed in various demilitarisation faciUties. These include flashing furnaces that remove all vestiges of explosive from metal parts to assure safety in handling deactivation furnaces, to render safe small arms and nonlethal chemical munitions fluidized-bed incinerators that bum slurries of ground up propellants or explosives in oil and rotary kilns to destroy explosive and contaminated waste and bulk explosive. 

Sources of human exposure to formaldehyde are engine exhaust, tobacco smoke, natural gas, fossil fuels, waste incineration, and oil refineries (129). It is found as a natural component in fmits, vegetables, meats, and fish and is a normal body metaboHte (130,131). FaciUties that manufacture or consume formaldehyde must control workers exposure in accordance with the following workplace exposure limits in ppm action level, 0.5 TWA, 0.75 STEL, 2 (132). In other environments such as residences, offices, and schools, levels may reach 0.1 ppm HCHO due to use of particle board and urea—formaldehyde foam insulation in constmction. 

Chemical Reaction Measurements. Experimental studies of incineration kinetics have been described (37—39), where the waste species is generally introduced as a gas in a large excess of oxidant so that the oxidant concentration is constant, and the heat of reaction is negligible compared to the heat flux required to maintain the reacting mixture at temperature. The reaction is conducted in an externally heated reactor so that the temperature can be controlled to a known value and both oxidant concentration and temperature can be easily varied. The experimental reactor is generally a long tube of small diameter so that the residence time is well defined and axial dispersion may be neglected as a source of variation. Off-gas analysis is used to track both the disappearance of the feed material and the appearance and disappearance of any products of incomplete combustion. 

The classical experiment tracks the off-gas composition as a function of temperature at fixed residence time and oxidant level. Treating feed disappearance as first order, the pre-exponential factor and activation energy, E, in the Arrhenius expression (eq. 35) can be obtained. These studies tend to confirm large activation energies typical of the bond mpture mechanism assumed earlier. However, an accelerating effect of the oxidant is also evident in some results, so that the thermal mpture mechanism probably overestimates the time requirement by as much as several orders of magnitude (39). Measurements at several levels of oxidant concentration are useful for determining how important it is to maintain spatial uniformity of oxidant concentration in the incinerator. 

Undesirable combustible gases and vapors can be destroyed by heating to the autoignition temperature in the presence of sufficient oxygen to ensure complete oxidation to CO2 and H2O. Gas incinerators are appHed to streams that are high energy, eg, pentane, or are too dilute to support combustion by themselves. The gas composition is limited typicaUy to 25% or less of the lower explosive limit. Gases that are sufficiendy concentrated to support... 

Catalytic Incinerators. Catalytic incinerators, often used to remove hydrocarbons from exhaust gas streams, are more compact than direct-flame incinerators, operate at lower temperatures, often require Htfle fuel, and produce Httle or no NO from atmospheric fixation. However, the catalytic bed must be preheated and carefliUy temperature controlled. Thus these are generally unsuited to intermittent and highly variable gas flows. 

Other developing or potential appHcations for lime are neutralization of tail gas from sulfuric acid plants, neutralization of waste hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids and of nitrogen oxide (NO ) gases, scmbbing of stack gases from incinerators (qv), and of course, from small industrial coal-fired boilers. 

The product stream contains gases and soflds. The soflds are removed by using either cyclones, filters, or both in combination. Cyclones are devices used to separate soflds from fluids using vortex flow. The product gas stream must be cooled before being sent to the collection and refining system. The ALMA process uses cyclones as a primary separation technique with filters employed as a final separation step after the off-gas has been cooled and before it is sent to the collection and refining system (148). As in the fixed-bed process, the reactor off-gas must be incinerated to destroy unreacted butane and by-products before being vented to the atmosphere. 

Maleic anhydride in the product stream is removed and converted to a maleic acid solution in a water scmbbing system. The maleic acid is sent to the hydrogenation to produce THF while the reactor off-gas after scmbbing is sent to the recycle compressor. A small purge stream is sent to incineration. 

The reactor off-gas is cooled by one or more heat exchangers and sent to the collection and refining section of the plant. Unreacted benzene and by-products are incinerated. 

A significant part of HDPE is coUected from consumers for recycling uncoUected HDPE can be disposed of by landfiU or incineration. In landfiU, HDPE is completely inert, degrades very slowly, does not produce gas, and does not leach any poUutants into groundwater. When incinerated in... 

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