Thermal Stability Analysis in a Two-Step Reactive Cylindrical Stockpile

Thermal stability analysis in a cylindrical stockpile of reactive material undergoing a two-step low-temperature oxidation reaction is studied in this article. The reactant consumption in this case is neglected and heat transfer with thermal stability are investigated by application of the energy equation. The complicated combustion process results with nonlinear interactions and hence the nonlinear partial differential equation governing the problem is tackled numerically using the semi-implicit Finite Difference Method (FDM). Kinetic parameters embedded on the governing partial differential equation, are varied to study the behavior of the temperature during the combustion process. The results are depicted graphically and adequately discussed, to bring an understanding of heat transfer and thermal stability during the combustion process. The study in this paper is relevant to multistep combustion process analogous to the fuel combustion in automobiles. The results, in general, show that thermal stability is more for sensitized chemical kinetics than for bimolecular type of kinetics.