Abstract
The blast furnace casthouse is a typical heavy-polluting factory building of a steel enterprise. During the tapping process and the taphole opening, the dust concentration in the factory building's workroom can reach tens of thousands mg/m3. Over time, the air pollutants in the workplace can have unwanted consequences on employees' health. This paper selected a typical blast furnace tapping workshop. The flow, temperature, and soot concentration fields in the workshop are measured on site during tapping, and the distribution characteristics are obtained. The performance of the tapping smoke exhaust system is analyzed based on computational fluid dynamics. The findings are as follows: the concentration of PM2.5 in most of the work area was 80μg/m3, but the concentration reached 1mg/m3 near the slag ditch, which was heavy pollution. Because the opening and closing of doors and windows was unreasonable, it was difficult for the particulate matter to accumulate in the deep and middle of the plant discharge. The PMV of the worker's work area is about 3, and the waste heat removal efficiency is 4.2. Hence, this article's finding provides a scientific basis for optimizing the air distribution in the blast furnace cast house's workplace.
Highlights
China is the top steel producer globally (Tang et al,2020)
This paper selected a typical blast furnace tapping workshop and conducted on-site measurement to obtain the characteristics of the wind speed distribution, temperature distribution, and soot concentration distribution in the workshop during the tapping period; it established a numerical simulation model based on computational fluid dynamics and further analyzed the performance of the taphole smoke exhaust system
31°C, while the temperature in the vicinity of the slag ditch, iron ditch, and blast furnace is around 33°C, with the highest temperature reaching 40°C, which is still very high
Summary
China is the top steel producer globally (Tang et al,2020). The iron and steel industry is a major air pollutant emitter and has become China's largest industrial PM emission source (Wang et al,2019). In order to deal with air pollution, iron and steel companies must improve flue gas management. Biswas et al (2014) found that 91.66% of 213 workers may have bronchial asthma and 88.75% of chronic bronchitis after long-term exposure. Excessive heat exposure causes workers to experience sweating, thirst, insomnia, fatigue, and muscle discomfort (Krishnamurthy et al,2017; Fahed et al,2018). It is significant to improve the smoke and dust control and the plant's ventilation and heat exchange efficiency
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