Coal firing furnace and method of operating a coal-fired furnace

A method of operating a pulverized coal-firing furnace so as to achieve no more than a predetermined variation in the instantaneous vertical velocities of the flow exiting a combustion chamber of the furnace, the combustion chamber having four corners each substantially equidistant from adjacent corners such that the combustion chamber has a substantially square cross section, the method comprising:

• providing a series of lower compartments for introducing therethrough one of air, fuel, and air and fuel into the combustion chamber, the lower series of compartments extending into the bottom half of the furnace in a vertical arrangement with the series of lower compartments being successively located one below another in an extent from a topmost one of the lower compartments to a bottommost one of the lower compartments;
• providing a combined fuel and air nozzle mounted above the lowermost series of compartments for introducing a stream of pulverized coal entrained with air into the furnace;
• providing at least one upper compartment for introducing air into the combustion chamber, the at least one upper compartment being disposed above the topmost compartment of the series of lower compartments at a relative disposition to the topmost compartment in a spacing range between a contiguous disposition to a more spaced disposition which is no more than twice the average spacing between any given compartment and an adjacent compartment;
• tangentially firing fuel from at least one of the series of lower compartments into the combustion chamber at an offset from a diagonal passing through a pair of opposed corners of the combustion chamber;
• tangentially introducing air from the series of lower compartments into the combustion chamber along a direction which is offset to the diagonal on the same side thereof as the fuel firing offset direction, the collective amount of air tangentially introduced through the lower compartments being less than the stoichiometric amount of air required for complete combustion of the fuel tangentially fired into the furnace such that the fuel and air create a swirling fireball in the combustion chamber;
• injecting air from the at least one upper compartment generally in opposition to the swirling fireball along a direction which is offset to the other side of the diagonal in a manner such that the injected air promotes the evolution of the swirling fireball into an upward flow in the top half of the furnace characterized by portions thereof flowing upward at differing vertical velocities with a maximum variation of no more than thirty percent between the instantaneous vertical velocities of the portions of the upward flow as measured across a horizontal plane in the top half of the furnace;
• and
• introducing a stream of air entrained pulverized coal from the combined fuel and air nozzle into the furnace generally in opposition to the swirling fireball along a direction which is offset to the other side of the diagonal.