Speaker
Description
Bottom blowing, combined with top-blowing, is a widely used approach in the BOS process to enhance the mixing across the phases and reduce the time to decarburize the hot metal. Damages due to scrap loading or blockages by solidified steel or slag could reduce the available number of bottom blowing tuyeres, particularly during the last heats of the campaign. This reduces the mixing efficiency and leads to issues like increased CO product. It is surmised that placing more tuyeres in the converter during the relining could lead to availability of more tuyeres near the end of the campaign. The objective of the current work is to use CFD to predict the effects of the bottom tuyere configurations and gas flow rates on the interfacial exchanges. Euler-Euler multiphase model has been used to predict the scalar transport across the metal-slag and metal-gas interfaces for various tuyere configurations and gas flow rates in a worn out converter. Passive tracers are used to study the transport and compared against the model representing the current configuration in use. It was observed that the total gas flow rate, the number of tuyeres, and the radial placements of tuyeres affect the performance significantly while the angular placements of the tuyeres and the flow rate per tuyere do not affect the performance in any significant manner.