Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DECRON (Development of eco-friendly ironmaking processes based onGPU-enhanced DEM-CFD modelling)
Reporting period: 2017-12-01 to 2019-11-30
This is important as the steel making industry in the EU is under serve strain owing to increased production costs and emission levels, thus been able to optimise the operation of blast furnaces will lower production costs as well as reduce emissions.
Due to the extreme nature of a blast furnace obtaining information via experimental means is limited. Therefore this project aimed to use numerical modelling techniques in-order to provide a simulation of the relevant processes during blast furnace charging. While there have been a number of simulation studies on blast furnace charging they have all used simplified particle shapes in-order to reduce computational run times.
Thus the focus of this project has been to shed light on the effect that the particle shape has on the simulation results thus its ability to provide a closer match to reality. The main objective of this project has been to demonstrate how particle shape can change the spatial topology of the packed bed thus allowing blast furnace operations to achieve the desired distribution of the feed materials in the blast furnace.
The first four months of Year 2 involved the development of models for heat transfer involving polyhedral particles as well as the development of experiments to validate the develop code. The next four months involved a study on the effect of heat transfer in packed beds using the developed models as well as a keynote talk on the effects of particle shape in blast furnace charging at the DEM 8 conference in the Netherlands. In the final three months of the project the developed software was presented within the group to enable uptake after the project ends, a final paper on the effect of particle shape on heat flow was submitted as well as an invited keynote talk INCHEM 2019, Tokyo was done.