Worldwide, the steel industry and the non-ferrous metals industry follow a decarburization strategy to meet the green house gas emission reduction targets. Regardless of which route is used for the respective product - in the case of steel, for example, the route via the blast furnace-converter, the direct reduction plant or the electric arc furnace – the metallurgical aggregates can always be modified and improved. As a result of the enormous increase in computing power and progress of solution algorithms in recent years, it is possible to simulate fluid flow and thermal phenomena which could not yet been calculated so far; CFD provides insights into plant areas that cannot be observed or measured directly due to the extreme boundary conditions prevailing there.
The presentation focuses on typical questions that the engineer is confronted within his daily work and illustrates the huge potential of CFD. Both, the difficulties in modelling and the practical solutions from the point of view of the plant builder and the analogue operator are discussed, but also the limits of today's simulation techniques are briefly dealt.
The following metallurgical devices are discussed:
- Basic oxygen furnace (BOF): Combined blowing converter with oxygen top blowing and inert gas bottom stirring.
-Electric arc furnace (EAF): Supersonic oxygen jets and how they affect the melt/slag domain.
-Steelmaking ladle: Bottom stirring and mixing effects in large-sized ladles.
-Peirce-Smith converter: Copper matte refinement using convergent-divergent nozzles.
-Vacuum inert gas atomization (VIGA): Physical and numerical simulation of the close-coupled
atomization process in order to predict the metal particle size distribution.
-Hybrid burner/injector: Replacement of natural gas with hydrogen in the EAF burner