Inverse boundary design of a radiative smelting furnace with ablative phase change phenomena

Abstract

An inverse analysis is employed to control the time rate of heaters in a 2-D smelting furnace to provide the specified radiative heat flux across the design surface to establish a desired melting rate. The design surface in the smelting furnace is the melting surface of the metal concentrate bank, and the melting process is considered to occur as an ablation phenomenon. The net radiation method is used to determine the radiation exchange between the elements of the furnace surfaces and the melting surface. The conjugate gradient method is employed to minimize the objective function, which is the sum of square residuals between the estimated and the desired heat fluxes over the design surface. It is shown that the proposed inverse technique is reliable and accurate for predicting the heater power distribution.