New VectorWall™ High Temperature Reaction Chamber Mixing Technology

Blasch introduces VectorWall™ mixing technology
Following a period of consultation with customers as to what they wanted from reaction furnace checkerwall systems, Blasch Precision Ceramics has developed a refinement to its reaction furnace mixing checkerwall systems. The new VectorWall™ technology improves the operations of reaction furnaces and boiler tube sheets.
Plant operators were seeking improved mixing, so as to improve combustion efficiency, increased reactant path length, so as to improve destruction of unwanted compounds, better radiant heat protection, so as to protect the tubesheet refractory from direct flame impingement and hot spots, and an increase in the reaction furnace effective volume area through the elimination of dead zones in applications that use multiple partial walls instead of checkerwalls. A number of alternatives were considered that attempted to maximise these at the lowest cost in terms of pressure drop. Most of them focused on creating mixing within the confines of the individual holes in the HexWall™ checkerwall, but that increased the pressure drop prohibitively while not promoting intermingling of the individual flows exiting the back of the wall.

At that point, the effort to effect change within the blocks was dropped, and a more macro approach was taken, and the vortex became an obvious solution. The flow was modelled and showed the swirling flow to have minimal negative impact on pressure drop and excellent mixing characteristics. An add-on to the existing HexWall™ blocks – the Vector Tile – was therefore developed to establish vortex flow in the reaction chamber. Tests at a customer who had been experiencing considerable difficulty with the thermal profile of their reaction furnace and had, as a result, seen substantial fouling of the waste heat boiler tubes in the lower portion of the bundle, produced dramatic improvement after the installation of the VectorWall™.