A novel gas injection method with swirl flow in underground gasification for improving gas production and controlling pollution yields

Underground coal gasification (UCG) is a promising technology, which can convert deep coal seams into high calorific value gas products through in-situ controllable combustion, for the traditional coal mining technology. However, the structure of raw coal is dense, and it is difficult for the injected gasification agent to penetrate from the coal surface to the inside of coal in the gasification channel, which leads to worse gasification performance. Different from conventional straight flow injection, swirl flow injection is proposed to improve the effective contact between the gas and the coal surface to enhance the gasification reaction efficiency. In this work, various types of novel swirl nozzles were independently designed. The characteristics of gas production, temperature distribution and tar pollutant are studied with different swirl angles. As the swirl number increases from 0 to 1.41, there is a significant enhancement in the residence time of oxygen in the axial direction and a reduction of the mass transfer between oxygen and the coal wall in the radial direction. As the oxygen flow rate increases from 0.5 to 2 L/min, swirl flow injection exhibits stronger gasification performance than traditional straight flow injection, such as maximum gas calorific value and tar generation control capability.