Unprecedented Insight into the Thermal Processing of a Blast Furnace

Abstract

Although the steel industry undergoes a transition from traditional blast furnace technology to "green" steel, the blast furnace and its variants produce still the largest amount of steel. Hence, a thorough understanding of the internal process of a blast furnace is indispensable for improved performance, in particular, facing challenges of hydrogen injection. The current simulation platform derived from the extended discrete element method (XDEM) with its detailed resolution of the blast furnace processes based on first principles closes a mayor knowledge gap and, thus, allows for a digital twin of blast furnaces. An Euler-Lagrange coupling forms the platform for the simulation framework, in which coke and iron-bearing material is treated dynamically and thermodynamically as individual entities in the Lagrangian frame of reference, whereas the multi-phase flow regime in the interstitial space is described through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Both, multi-phase flow and particulate material interact by heat, mass and momentum transfer. A thorough analysis of the high resolution results unveils the internal physics of a blast furnace and, thus, becomes an integral tool for design and operation within a smart virtual prototyping (SVP) environment of the digital twin technology (DTT).