Enhancement and performance evaluation for heat transfer of air cooling zone for reduction system of sponge titanium

Abstract

Since the magnesiothermic reduction employed in current sponge titanium is a highly exothermic reaction, the TiCl4 feed rate is carried out slowly to keep a suitable temperature in reduction reactor, which accounts for an extremely low level of productivity and energy efficiency. In order to shorten the production cycle and improve the energy efficiency, an enhancing scheme is proposed to enhance the heat transfer of air cooling zone for reduction system. The air cooling zone and enhancing scheme are firstly introduced. And then, the heat transfer characteristics of cooling zone are obtained by theoretical analysis and experimental date without enhancing scheme. Finally, the enhancement is analyzed and evaluated. The results show that the fitting results of heat transfer coefficients can be used to evaluate the heat transfer enhancement of cooling zone. Heat sources temperatures have a limited decreasing, heat transfer rate increases obviously with the enhanced cooling, and the TiCl4 feed rate can be increased significantly by 9.61 %. And the measured and calculated results are good enough to meet the design requirements.