The combustion of fuel derived from municipal solid waste is a promising cheap retrofitting technique for coal power plants, having the added benefit of reducing the volume of waste disposal in landfills. co-combustion of waste-derived fuel (WDF) and coal, rather than switching to WDF combustion alone in dedicated power plants, allows power plant operators to be flexible toward variations in the WDF supply. Substituting part of the coal feed by processed high calorific value waste could reduce the NOx, SO2, and CO2 emissions of coal power plants. However, the alkaline content of WDF and its potentially harmful interactions with the coal ash, as well as adverse effects from the presence of chlorine in the waste, are important drawbacks to waste-derived fuel use in large-scale power plants. This chapter reviews these points and gives a centralized review of co-combustion experiments reported in the literature. Finally, this chapter underlines the importance of lab-scale experiments previous to any large-scale application and introduces the idea of combining waste and additives dedicated to the capture of targeted pollutants.
Part of the book: Developments in Combustion Technology