Simulation of flow and heat transfer in the duct elbow of an electric arc furnace

Abstract

One of the common problems of water-cooled panels which is carrying off-gas from Electric Arc Furnace is cracking and punching in their steel bodies due to the high thermal stresses which cause water leakage into the furnace and delaying the production. In this study, heat transfer in the elbow of water-cooled panels was simulated in the steady and transient states using computational fluid dynamics. Hot flue gases of furnace, panel body, and cooling water were simultaneously considered as a computational domain to understand their interaction using conjugate approach. After developing computational grids and applying suitable boundary conditions, the problem was simulated using Ansys-Fluent software. The velocity and temperature contours of cooling water and hot gases for all parts of the computational field were obtained. The results showed that in steady state, the temperature of hot gases decreases about 205 °C within the duct elbow, whereas the temperature of cooling water increases about 8.2 °C. The maximum panels’ body temperature was 90.2 °C, which was occurred in the bends of 180° of water-cooled panel. The results of simulation showed that in the case of replacing the material of panel body by copper, the maximum panels’ body temperature is reduced about 20 K. The simulation results showed good agreements with experimental data.