8th International Congress on Science and Technology of Ironmaking - ICSTI 2018

To achieve a stable and efficient blast furnace operation it is important to have a controlled gas flow inside the furnace with a proper burden distribution, thus a strict control of the particulate material size distribution inside the charge is required to avoid generation of preferential paths of the gas molecules through the burden. This work uses Discrete Element Method (DEM) to simulate raw material loading into a blast furnace equipped with a Bell Less Top (BLT) system. The simulations were based on a real operation of a steelmaking plant in Rio de Janeiro. The simulations allowed the evaluation of the contribution of the physical properties of the raw materials fed into the furnace such as size distribution, shape, density and mechanical resistance, as well as the effect of the rotating chute of the BLT system on the loading of coke and the metallic burden constituted of sinter, iron ore and pellet particles. The effect of wear on the rotating chute were also investigated. Also, a post-processing tool was developed that allowed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the DEM simulation results in terms of particle size and component segregation at the top of the blast furnace. Thus, this work establishes the foundations of a methodology that allows search for an optimum rotating chute algorithm as function the burden properties.