During recent years, there has been great interest in exploring the potential for high-rate natural gas (NG) injection in North American blast furnaces (BFs) due to the fuel’s relatively low cost, operational advantages, and reduced carbon footprint. However, it is well documented that increasing NG injection rates results in declining raceway flame temperatures (a quenching effect on the furnace, so to speak), with the end result of a functional limit on the maximum injection rate that can be used while maintaining stable operation. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of the BF raceway and shaft regions developed by Purdue University Northwest’s (PNW) Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation (CIVS) have been applied to simulate multi-phase reacting flow in industry blast furnaces with the aim of exploring the use of pre-heated NG as a method of widening the BF operating window. Simulations predicted that pre-heated NG injection could increase the flow of sensible heat into the BF and promote complete gas combustion through increased injection velocity and improved turbulent mixing. Modeling also indicated that the quenching effects of a 15% increase in NG injection rate could be countered by a 300K NG pre-heat. This scenario maintained furnace raceway flame temperatures and top gas temperatures at levels similar to those observed in baseline (stable) operation, while reducing coke rate by 6.3%.

Pulverised coal injection (PCI) is a widely adopted industry practice for reducing blast furnace coke rates. The conditions under which pulverised coal (PC) is injected and combusted, including the co-injection of natural gas (NG), can lead to complex combustion phenomena inside the blast furnace, which must be understood to provide improved furnace performance. This research examines computational simulations of the co-injection phenomena, as well as the industrial drivers behind the project. A wide-ranging parametric study was conducted utilising numerous variations in furnace operating conditions, as well as a new technique for the conveyance of PC. It was found that utilising NG as the carrier gas for PCI could increase coal burnout across the raceway region from about 71% to approximately 87% without altering the design of the tuyere/ blowpipe region, with an increase to 96% possible if a shift to a dual lance design for NG injection is considered.

Despite the age of the process, the blast furnace remains critical to industrial ironmaking. With advances in analysis technologies and control systems, and economic pressure from competitive new ironmaking techniques, modern blast furnace operation has become more efficient. However, room still exists for improvement, particularly in the blast furnace raceway region. Further development requires better understanding of phenomena within the blast furnace, including heat transfer, mass transfer, chemical reactions, and multiphase flow. To that end, computational simulation and visualization, in multiple approaches, are increasingly used to explore blast furnace phenomena. Current computational approaches range from simplified tools designed for rapid turn‐around times to complex solvers intended to capture the movement of discrete particles within the furnace. This paper reviews recent current state‐of‐the‐art techniques for simulation and visualization of the blast furnace developed by the Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation (CIVS) at Purdue University Northwest (PNW), as well as an overview of other advanced techniques in the field.

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With the recent push towards high injection rate blast furnace operation for economic and environmental reasons, it has become desirable in North America to better understand the impacts of alternate injected gas fuels in comparison to the well-documented limitations of natural gas. The quenching effects of gas injection on the furnace present a functional limit on the maximum stable injection rate which can be utilized. With this in mind, researchers at Purdue University Northwest’s Center for Innovation through Visualization and Simulation utilized previously developed computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of the blast furnace to explore the impacts of replacing natural gas with syngas in a blast furnace with a single auxiliary fuel supply. Simulations predicted that the syngas injection can indeed reduce coke consumption in the blast furnace at similar injection rates to natural gas while maintaining stable raceway flame and reducing gas temperatures. The coke rates predicted by modeling using similar injection rates indicated an improvement of 8 to 15 kg/thm compared to baseline conditions when using the syngas of various feedstocks. Additionally, syngas injection scenarios typically produced higher raceway flame temperatures than comparable natural gas injection cases, indicating potential headroom for reducing oxygen enrichment in the hot blast or providing an even higher total injection rate.

The energy production and performance of wind turbines is heavily impacted by the aerodynamic properties of the turbine blades. Designing a wind turbine blade to take full advantage of the available wind resource is a complex task, and teaching students the aerodynamic aspects of blade design can be challenging. To address this educational challenge, a 3D software package was developed as part of the Mixed Reality Simulators for Wind Energy Education project, sponsored through the U.S. Department of Education’s FIPSE program. The software is suited for introductory wind energy courses and covers topics including blade aerodynamics, wind turbine components, and energy transfer. The simulator software combines a 3D model of a utility-scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT) with animation, a set of interactive controls, and a series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of an airfoil under a number of conditions. Students can fly around the wind turbine to view from any angle, adjust transparency layers to view components inside the nacelle, adjust a cross-section plane along the length of a blade to view the details of the blade design, and manipulate sliders to adjust variables such as angle of attack and Reynolds number and see contour plots in real-time. The application is available for download at www.windenergyeducation.org, and is planned for release as open source.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a rising technology that creates a computer-generated immersive environment to provide users a realistic experience, through which people who are not analysis experts become able to see numerical simulation results in a context that they can easily understand. VR supports a safe and productive working environment in which users can perceive worlds, which otherwise could be too complex, too dangerous, or impossible or impractical to explore directly, or even not yet in existence. In recent years, VR has been employed to an increasing number of scientific research areas across different disciplines, such as numerical simulation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) discussed in present study. Wind flow around wind turbines is a complex problem to simulate and understand. Predicting the interaction between wind and turbine blades is complicated by issues such as rotating motion, mechanical resistance from the breaking system, as well as inter-blade and inter-turbine wake effects. The present research uses CFD numerical simulation to predict the motion and wind flow around two types of turbines: 1) a small scale Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT) and 2) a small scale Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT). Results from these simulations have been used to generate virtual reality (VR) visualizations and brought into an immersive environment to attempt to better understand the phenomena involved.