Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral

Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Matemáticas

QUIG1047 – Chemical Plant Design
Reading Quiz No. 1

In this paper, the author aims to describe several technical improvements to optimize Waste-to
Energy plants, which are briefly described as plants that use municipal solid waste (MSW) to
produce steam by using a boiler and then use this steam for several purposes in the production
industry. The author also emphasizes the fact that some processes in the industry will be highly
improved considering the optimization of these techniques, such as energy production, heat
recovery, flue gas cleaning and waste combustion.

Some of the main issues found regarding the usage of WtE plants for municipal solid waste are the
impact of process and operational conditions stability in the plant’s performance since household
waste composition varies according to seasonal changes and it requires different conditions for its
burning in the boilers throughout the year. Also, there is a concern about the production of nitrogen
oxide since the method requires burning of household waste which contains food, animal waste, and
even bath waste, all of this while meeting emission limit values of NO x, the concern also includes the
amount of ammonia that should be used. Another issue presented during the paper is considerations
on low-temperature heat recovery since it is complex and expensive to set external economizers or
heat exchangers to get lower limit temperatures to not demand a high performance to the boilers
used in the process. However, sometimes using equipment that belongs to the process can give
better results. Other issues are considered in the WtE plants process such as ash and residue
treatment, flue gas cleaning, and boiler corrosion.

The initial process was carried out in January with certain parameters of waste throughput and
primary combustion air. However, three months later the process was stabilized by tuning the PID
controller of the combustion system, similar psychochemical properties were entered in the system
resulting in a smoother feeding of waste, lower consumption of primary combustion air and reduced
fluctuations of the steam production. After these slight changes that didn’t require modification of the
parameters, the overall stability of the process improved.

The municipal solid waste combustion in boilers in the Waste-to Energy Plants produce fly ash and
residues of called APC (Air Pollution Control) that contain considerable amounts of water-soluble
heavy metal compounds that can cause environmental problems, which is why an efficient treatment
for detoxification is required before final disposal on a landfill.

The main conclusions of the article and author’s work address Waste-to-Energy plants as an efficient
technique, since it has proven to be reliable, cost-effective and it is based on treating large amounts
of municipal solid waste to produce steam that can be used in other processes. However, there are

Odalys Rosales Alvarez 01/06/2023

operational and design factors that still need to be optimized to obtain better and less pollutant
results.

Odalys Rosales Alvarez 01/06/2023