EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

1. Copper staves are being used widely as blast furnace body cooling components. Blast furnace production and life-time sustainability is directly related with the durability of the copper staves. Copper staves protects the refractory and furnace shell from the heat load and adverse mechanical effects due to the formation of an accretion layer. Since the stave maintenance and replacement is almost impossible due to their hard-to-reach location during the BF is in service, performance sustainability of the copper staves have crucial importance in terms of blast furnace productivity and life-time as well. High level productivity and longer blast furnace service life- time can be achieved by a trouble free copper stave cooling system. In this paper, root causes of the copper stave failures are investigated, a new approach for the risk of these failures is presented, and binary logistic regression analyses of the blast furnace design and operation parameters are performed.