Pyrometallurgical furnaces are tapped through tap-holes that are opened with drills and oxygen lances. The lance is often used on its own or as the last step of opening the tap-hole. Interaction of oxygen with molten material inside the tap-hole can occur, and is a phenomenon that is not well understood. As part of a study that focuses on the effect of lancing on flow inside and around the furnace tap-hole, a cold-model validation was done. The validation study focuses on validating the MULTIPHASEINTERFOAM multiphase flow solver in OpenFOAM® for the problem involved. The sensitivity of the model to different materials properties (viscosity and density in particular) is presented with both cold models and the results from flow simulations in OpenFOAM®.
A holistic conceptualisation of the variables forming part of tap-hole lifecycle management and performance was defined previously for coke bed-based processes in which submerged arc furnace technology of circular design was applied. In the work presented here, the variables were applied to silicomanganese production comparing the tap-hole lifecycle management practices and performance among five furnaces on one site. The quantified independent variables were divided into four functions associated with the tap-hole lifecycle (operations, reline, maintenance, and repair), and a selection of the results is reported here. Having the benchmark available will contribute to comparative studies in future.
Multiphase fluid flow is an active field of research in numerous branches of science and technology. An interesting subset of multiphase flow problems involves the dispersion of one phase into another in the form of many small bubbles or droplets, and their subsequent separation back into bulk phases after this has occurred. Phase dispersion may be a desirable effect, for example in the production of emulsions of otherwise immiscible liquids or to increase interfacial surface area for chemical reactions, or an undesirable one, for example in the intermixing of waste and product phases during processing or the generation of foams preventing gas-liquid decoupling. The present paper describes a computational fluid dynamics method based on the multiple marker front-capturing algorithm – itself an extension of the volume-of-fluids method for multiphase flow – which is capable of scaling to mesoscale systems involving thousands of droplets or bubbles. The method includes sub-grid models for solution of the Reynolds equation to account for thin film dynamics and rupture. The method is demonstrated with an implementation in the OpenFOAM® computational mechanics framework. Comparisons against empirical data are presented, together with a performance benchmarking study and example applications.
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