A megawatt-scale zero-carbon pure ammonia burner for industrial furnaces and its supporting system – jointly developed by Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), Sinopec Guangzhou Engineering Company, and Jiangsu Yanxin Technology Co – achieved successful hot-state testing in Jiangyin, Jiangsu province.

This marks the world's first breakthrough in zero-carbon, clean, and efficient combustion of pure ammonia for industrial furnaces, opening a new path for energy conservation and low-carbon transformation in the energy and chemical sectors.

Project team photo at the hot-state testing site.

The research team focused on key technologies such as ignition characteristics of pure ammonia, flame propagation speed and flow field matching, stable combustion conditions, and the integrated design of the ammonia burner system. They independently developed, designed, and constructed the core technology and equipment.

The successful full-load, stable operation test of the megawatt-scale burner demonstrated the feasibility of ammonia as a clean, zero-carbon replacement for traditional fuels like natural gas in industrial furnaces.

As a safe, clean, low-cost fuel for storage and transport, ammonia enables carbon reduction at the source. For example, using pure ammonia in a 100 MW industrial furnace can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 170,000 metric tons annually.

The success of this trial lays a solid foundation for the use of ammonia fuel in the petrochemical industry and shows potential in other high-emission sectors such as ceramics and metallurgy.

The XJTU team involved in the project comes from the School of Energy and Power Engineering and the National Key Laboratory of Green Hydrogen and Power, led by professors Huang Zuohua and Wang Jinhua and Associate Professor Zhang Meng. Their research focuses on fundamental combustion processes in aerospace, gas turbines, internal combustion systems, and zero-carbon fuel applications in power and industrial systems. Their work includes high-efficiency, low-NOx combustion of gaseous/liquid ammonia in gas turbines, large-scale ammonia combustion control in industrial settings, and monitoring key pollutants in ammonia combustion.