Speaker
Description
During slag granulation, after metal separation in the Blast Furnace Main Trough, the contact between water and slag can lead to explosions, due to presence of pig iron in the slag. Aiming to reduce the molten metal passage through the slag port of a main trough in a Brazilian steel mill, in order to avoid explosions during slag granulation, multiphase numerical simulations were performed for different geometric configurations of the main trough. It was used a VOF (Volume of Fluid) model to represent the interactions between the fluids (molten metal, slag and air), coupled with a DPM (Discrete Particle Model) to represent metal particles coming from the blast furnace. The metal separation was analyzed by measuring the amount of metal, both fluid and particle, which flows out through the slag port. The impacts of increasing the width, the depth and the slag thickness in the metal separation were analyzed. Simulation results show that the width increase reduces the metal passage through the slag port, while increase in depth can jeopardize the slag separation, due to higher wave velocities. Also, it was found that slag thickening impacts positively in the fluid separation, however, for the separation of metal particles in the bath, an improvement is observed only above a certain increase in thickness.