Abstract

The main production route for cast iron and steel is through the blast furnace. The silicon content in cast iron is an important indicator of the thermal condition of a blast furnace. High silicon contents indicate an increase in the furnace's thermal input and, in some cases, may indicate an excess of coke in the reactor. As coke costs predominate in the production of cast iron, tighter control of the silicon content therefore has economic advantages. The main objective of this article was to design an artificial neural network to predict the silicon content in hot metal, varying the number of neurons in the hidden layer by 10, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125 , 150, 170 and 200 neurons. In general, all neural networks showed excellent results, with the network with 30 neurons showing the best results among the 12 modeled networks. The validation of the models was confirmed using the Mean Square Error (MSE) and Pearson's correlation coefficient. The cross-validation technique was used to re-evaluate the performance of neural networks. In short, neural networks can be used in practical operations due to the excellent correlations between the real values ​​and those calculated by the neural network.

Highlights

  • The main route for the production of cast iron and steel is through the blast furnace

  • Steel is generally produced in two steps: First, the pig iron, called hot metal, is obtained, which consists mainly of iron, a high carbon content, and impurities such as sulfur, phosphorus, and silicon[1,2,3]

  • Hot metal is usually produced in a blast furnace, a chemically similar but spongy-looking material can be obtained by the process of direct reduction, which is used in a similar way to the hot metal produced in a blast furnace

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Summary

Introduction

The main route for the production of cast iron and steel is through the blast furnace. This article is about the control of silicon in blast furnaces fed with metallurgical coke[4,5,6]. The blast furnace is fed from the top with lump iron ore, sinter, pellets, fluxes such as dolomite and limestone, and a fuel called metallurgical coke. Hot air is blown into the furnace from the bottom, through the tuyeres. Fuels such as pulverized coal, biogas and natural gas are injected into this area. A part of the blast furnace gas is burned in the hot stoves to heat the air jet entering the furnace to about 1050°C. The air jet is enriched with oxygen[7,8,9,10]

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