The Linde Group has opened a new combustion center in Suzhou, China, the first center to be owned by an industrial gases company in that country.
The Linde Combustion Center is intended drive R&D initiatives in partnership with metal and glass industries and research institutes in projects to develop green combustion technologies and improve heat treatment processes geared towards future and sustainable applications.
The center will use technology to facilitate research and development work in metallurgy, steel, iron, nonferrous, mining and heat treatment industries. It also has an R&D demonstration facility for customer engagements.
Key growth region
‘China, together with the Asia Pacific countries, is a key growth region for The Linde Group,' said Steven Fang, regional business unit head, East Asia. ‘At the speed of development in this region, industries will increasingly seek for advanced solutions that are sustainable with greater emphasis on process efficiencies and product quality. This is the trend we are seeing especially in China.’
One key technology the company wants to develop is oxyfuel technology – the combustion of fossil fuels such as natural gas, oil or coal with technical oxygen instead of air for industrial melting or heating processes is state of art technology in many industries these days. Using oxygen instead of air as an oxidizer reduces the flue gas volumes by 70%. The energy that is taken out by the flue gas can be significantly reduced. Applying oxygen in industrial combustion processes can save 30 to 60% of the fuel input compared to air fuel operation.
This story is reprinted from material from Linde, with editorial changes made by Materials Today. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of Elsevier.
