CFD design of a novel device for temperature profile measurement in Waste-to-Energy plants

Monitoring the flue gas temperature is a crucial issue for Waste-to-Energy (WtE) plants companies, since it is essential to preserve the materials in the post-combustion chamber, the energy efficiency of the plants as well as to control the emissions of pollutants. As of today, the temperature of flue gases in such plants is commonly monitored by means of thermocouples, infrared pyrometers or aspirated thermocouples. However, all these instruments show limitations in terms of accuracy and reliability inside post-combustion chambers. In this paper, the authors present the thermo-fluid dynamics design of a novel device aimed at mitigating the issues of existing technologies, realised by using the modern CFD techniques. Numerical analyses, performed with the open-source OpenFOAM code, allowed to find a suitable shape for the device and to give a first estimate of the measuring errors, which are of the order of 2% (∼26 K at the typical working temperature of WtE plants' post-combustion chambers).