Chamber Furnace

the furnace of a steam boiler; usually a rectangular prismatic chamber in which fuel is burned in an air jet (fuel spray). Such furnaces burn pulverized solid fuel under boilers with steam capacities of 50–, 500 tons per hour or more and gaseous and liquid fuel under boilers with the same or lower capacities. Chamber furnaces are also installed on large hot-water boilers.

A chamber furnace consists of vertical walls, cover, and a coldhopper or hearth that are lined with refractory materials. Furnace baffles (pipes 32–76 mm in diameter through which the boiler water circulates) and an overhead or wall-mounted radiation super heater (in steam boilers) are installed on the interior surfaces of the chamber furnace. Fuel is fed into the chamber furnace, together with the air necessary for combustion, through jets mounted on the walls of the furnace and in its corners. During combustion of the powdered fuel, some of the ash is carried off by the flue gases from the furnace to the boiler-gas flues; the rest of it falls from the jet in the form of drops of slag, which are removed from the furnace as a granulated solid or amolten liquid, discharging from the furnace hearth through atapping hole into a slag catcher filled with water. Semienclosed chamber furnaces, which have a narrow section separating the furnace into two parts (a combustion chamber and a cooling chamber), are also made in large boiler units that operate onpulverized fuel.