Abstract
With the rapid depletion of high-yield copper mineral resources and the accumulation of secondary copper resources, the recycling of secondary copper is gaining popularity in the copper industry. A copper anode furnace, often used in copper recycling, usually relies on methane combustion to melt copper scraps. In this work, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of pure oxy-methane combustion is established to investigate the combustion characteristics of the CH4/O2 combustor in the copper anode furnace. The model is validated by comparing the simulation results with experimental measurements. The effects on flame length and temperature distribution are investigated under various fuel velocities, oxidizer velocities, and oxidizer temperatures. The results indicate that flame length and temperature distribution increase as the fuel velocity and oxidizer temperature increase, and decrease with the increase in oxidizer velocity. The flame length and temperature distribution always show an increasing trend with the increasing equivalence ratio. Based on the recycling capacity of the copper anode furnace, this validated CFD model can be used to optimize the operation parameters for controlling flame length and temperature distribution.
Highlights
With the rapid depletion of high-yield mineral resources, secondary copper resources have become an important materials supply for copper smelting industries
Ditaranto et al.[6] studied the coaxial CH4/O2 flame structure, and the results showed that the decrease in annular jet momentum leads to better turbulent mixing and, reduces the flame length
Mei et al.[13,14] defined a chemical flame length by carbon monoxide ratio at RCO = XCO/XCOmax = 0.01 for methane combustion, and the results indicated that this definition is more accurate than the other methods, such as those yCO/yCO2 = 0.002, and so on.[15−21] defined by
Summary
With the rapid depletion of high-yield mineral resources, secondary copper resources have become an important materials supply for copper smelting industries. The conventional melting process relies on fossil fuel combustion, using heavy oil or natural gas as the fuel and air as the oxidizer. Oxy-fuel combustion technology is gradually gaining popularity in the industrial production of copper, aluminum, iron, and steel because of its inherent advantages. Compared with the conventional combustion, oxy-fuel combustion has higher combustion efficiency, lower volumes of exhaust gas, lower fuel consumption, higher melting capacity, and lower NOx emission.[4] Especially when using pure oxygen combustion, NOx emission can theoretically be avoided altogether. Compared with pulverized coal, kerosene, and heavy oil, methane is widely used as the industrial fuel for its clean and high calorific value advantages. Because of the aforementioned relative advantages, related studies[5−8] of oxymethane combustion have been reported to promote a wide range of industrial applications of this technology. Shakeel et al.[8] simulated the CH4/
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