Abstract
In the bottom region of blast furnaces during the ironmaking process, the liquid iron and molten slag drip into the coke bed by the action of gravity. In this study, a practical multi-interfacial smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation is carried out to track the complex liquid transient dripping behavior involving two immiscible phases in the coke bed. Numerical simulations were performed for different conditions corresponding to different values of wettability force between molten slag and cokes. The predicted dripping velocity changes and interfacial shape were investigated. The relaxation of the surface force of liquid iron plays a significant role in the dripping rate; i.e., the molten slag on the cokes acts as a lubricant against liquid iron flow. If the attractive force between the coke and slag is smaller than the gravitational force, the slag then drops together with the liquid iron. When the attractive force between the coke and slag becomes dominant, the iron-slag interface will be preferentially detached. These results indicate that transient interface morphology is formed by the balance between the momentum of the melt and the force acting on each interface.
Highlights
An efficient trickle flow of high-temperature melts in coke beds is necessary in ironmaking blast furnaces, as it ensures a smooth continuous process, which is a prerequisite for high productivity in operations that use lower amounts of reducing agents
Numerical simulations using a multi-phase smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method were performed on two immiscible high-temperature melts dripping through a coke-packed bed during an ironmaking blast furnace process, namely, a binary trickle flow in which liquid iron and molten slag dripped simultaneously
The present detailed analysis helps in the rationalization of the unexplained transient behavior of liquid iron and molten slag presented by previous experiments
Summary
An efficient trickle flow of high-temperature melts in coke beds is necessary in ironmaking blast furnaces, as it ensures a smooth continuous process, which is a prerequisite for high productivity in operations that use lower amounts of reducing agents. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method discretizes a continuous fluid phase by moving particles and is suitable for analyzing interfacial flow, even for numerous dispersed phases This method can track the dripping flow [25], the movement of both the gas and the liquid phase [26], fluid flow in bed structures having different shapes (coupled with multi-sphere DEM) [27,28], and solid particle penetration into the liquid iron bath [29,30] directly. The trickle flow of a liquid iron and molten slag was simulated in the lower part of the blast furnace, and the effect of the wettability of molten slag and coke was investigated
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