Strict air pollution regulations in recent decades have been a driver for advanced low NOx burner development. The availability of computational fluid dynamics tools have accelerated this effort by enabling rapid investigation of many virtual designs in order to optimize the temperature and pollutant production field before going to physical prototype and test furnaces.

In addition to the challenges of pollution control and optimal heat transfer for steam production or process heat in combustion energy systems, creep and fatigue due to thermal stresses are another major concern of design engineers. Historically, information about flame characteristics or surface temperatures have been passed from combustion engineers to stress engineers, who independently applied those conditions in a structural analysis. Advanced tools that combine these two disciplines are becoming more commonplace.

In this study, coupled computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis are used to study flame shape, NOx production, and nozzle thermal stress in a coal-fired low NOx burner. Methodology, solution time, and best practices are covered.