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

The Bell Less Top Charging System invented and developed by Paul Wurth, is commonly recognized as Best Available Technology in the domain of blast furnace charging. This paper describes how the 2nd gen Bell Less Top, combined with stockhouse improvements and intelligent sampling devices can be used in order to expand blast furnace charging process know-how and to further optimize Blast Furnace charging, allowing in particular better monitoring and control of material segregation. In a first part, different design characteristics of the Bell Less Top and blast furnace charging will be described, including Discrete Element Method models. The second part will discuss stockhouse improvements. Finally, the summary will show how these improvements can be combined in order to control the charging process in a way suitable for every segregation requirements.