CFD modeling of a modern wood stove - Soot formation

Wood stoves are important domestic heating appliances using renewable bioenergy. However, the emission of Particulate Matter (PM) is the major concern for the application of wood stoves. Thus, improvements in the design of wood stoves are required for the reduction of PM emissions (mainly soot) to fulfill the increasingly stringent pollutant emission limits. To achieve low PM emission of the wood stove, a 3D steady-state CFD model is used to simulate the wood stove with a focus on soot formation in this study. The model is evaluated with the experimental data, the results of which show that the CFD model provides a reasonable prediction of wood stove experiments, indicating that the CFD model can be used as an efficient tool to optimize the design of the wood stove. The model is further used to study the effects of injection direction and mass flow rate of the tertiary air on the soot particle emission. It is found that the horizontal- and down-direction injectors can effectively reduce soot formation and an optimized tertiary air mass flow rate exists in the modern wood stove system. These conclusions are very useful in designing and developing the intelligent control system of the modern wood stove.