20th International Forgemasters Meeting - IFM 2017

**ABSTRACT** In recent years, regenerative burner is adopted to improve the combustion efficiency for heating furnaces. Typically, the heat storage media for this burner have the shape of ball or honeycomb, and are made from alumina or cordierite. TYK focuses on Silicon Carbide (SiC) for heat storage media. It is because SiC has lower thermal expansion, higher strength, higher thermal conductivity, and higher chemical resistance as heat storage media than alumina. We optimized the shape in media in terms of thermal conductivity and heat capacity and filling rate. As a result, the SiC performance was better than the alumina one. We applied the new developed SiC heat storage media to heating furnace with regenerative burner. Consequently, the combustion efficiency of furnaces has improved significantly. Therefore, fuel consumption ratio has been much reduced. We confirmed that the application of SiC brought the decrease of temperature tolerance and raising time during heating, and that there was not influence on quality of work pieces, as a result of having evaluated some characteristic. It will be reported for the evaluation of the life time of SiC media by actual operation. **Keywords**: Heating furnace; Regenerative burner; Heat storage media; Silicon Carbide (SiC); Combustion efficiency; Fuel consumption ratio