ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Energy Res.
Sec. Process and Energy Systems Engineering
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenrg.2025.1504820
Experimental Determination of Parameter Dependencies in the Combustion Process of a Radiant Tube Burner System
Provisionally accepted
- 1Faculty of Manufacturing Technologies, Technical University of Košice, Košice, Slovakia
- 2Institute of Metallurgy, Faculty of Materials, Metallurgy and Recycling, Technical University of Košice, Košice, KoSice, Slovakia
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The EU's environmental and energy policy has set goals for member states in increasing efficiency and effectiveness, reducing emissions, and lowering the consumption of fossil fuels as part of measures to decarbonize industry. An important part of the industrial sector consists of industrial furnaces, which include continuous annealing lines for the heat treatment of steel strips. Industrial furnaces operate with high energy consumption and by optimizing their energy processes it is possible to contribute to the decarbonization of the industry. The research in this manuscript focused on the analysis and optimization of an annealing furnace installed within a continuous annealing line. The heating process in the annealing furnace is carried out by indirect heating using radiant tube burners in a protective atmosphere. Based on the analysis of the operation of the burners in the different zones of the annealing furnace, it was necessary to determine the dependencies of the parameters of the combustion process. The experiments investigated the temperatures and the composition of the flue gases at different burner outputs, both individually and in groups according to the zones. Based on the results from the measurements, the factors influencing the combustion process in the annealing furnace were identified and the thermal operation was optimized based on the O₂ content in the flue gas, with 5 and 6% O 2 volume as the optimization criterion. After mathematical relationships were derived and regression analysis was performed, dependencies were established to better distribute the fuel among the burners, resulting in fuel savings of up to 9% of the fuel consumption and CO₂ emission reductions of up to 700 tCO2 per year. At the same time, the CO concentration in the flue gas was reduced. The proposed method was verified through control measurements in real operation.
Keywords: Radiant tube burner, recuperator, Flue gas analysis, Combustion optimization, Pressure loss
Received: 25 Oct 2024; Accepted: 14 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kizek, Varga, Rimar, Staško and Dzurňák. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jan Kizek, Faculty of Manufacturing Technologies, Technical University of Košice, Košice, Slovakia
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