2020 Volume 56 Issue 1 Pages 9-17
For the environmental impact assessment of thermal power plants, it is necessary to determine the wind speed distribution inside an outdoor-type coal storage yard to predict coal dust scattering. In this study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed for prediction of the wind velocity distribution in the coal storage yards. This model is based on a large-eddy simulation and can accurately consider the effect of wind fences with a wide range of opening ratios. The validity of the model was confirmed by comparing it to two types of wind-tunnel experiments; one is for the wake of a quasi-two-dimensional wind fence, while the other is for the wind field inside a coal storage yard, including its buildings and coal piles. We confirmed that the CFD model can accurately reproduce both types of wind fields with a slight overestimation. In addition, we predicted the amount of coal dust deposition using the wind speeds obtained from the wind-tunnel experiment and CFD model. Although the method based on the CFD model tends to overestimate the amount of deposition compared to the wind-tunnel based method, it was shown that the distribution shape and scattering range of the coal dust were similar for both methods.
