Chemical Composition Determination at the Bottom Region of a Recovery Boiler Furnace by Direct Minimization of Gibbs Free Energy

An optimization strategy has been applied to describe the chemical composition at the furnace bottom in the Kraft recovery boiler of a pulp production process. The concentrations of each involved chemical species were calculated through an optimization approach, minimizing the Gibbs free energy of the system. Various systems were proposed and tested, assuming different chemical species and phases number. Because serious initialization problems were found at this stage for some of the proposed systems, an optimization heuristic method (PSO) was used for the first approach to the problem. Once the appropriate phases number and chemical species in the system were determined, the initialization problems disappeared and the use of a deterministic optimization method (SQP) became viable. The proposed approach has shown to be satisfactory to reproduce industrial data and also data reported in the open scientific literature.