An Experimental and Simulated Study on Gas-Liquid Flow and Mixing Behavior in an ISASMELT Furnace

Abstract

In this study, a water-model experiment and numerical simulation were carried out in a pilot ISASMELT furnace to study the factors affecting mixing time. The experimental results were compared to the simulation results to test the accuracy of the latter. To study the internal factors that affect the mixing time, the turbulent viscosity and flow field were calculated using simulation. In addition, following previous research, external factors that influence the mixing time including the depth of the submerged lance, lance diameter, gas flow rate, and the presence of a swirler were studied to investigate their effect on the flow regime. The results indicated that the mixing time is controlled by the turbulent viscosity and velocity vector. In addition, it was found that the lance diameter should not exceed 3.55 cm to maintain sufficient energy for stirring the bath. Finally, the optimal gas flow rate that offers the best mixing efficiency was found to be 50 Nm3/h.

Insights into the hydrodynamics in the annular pipe of industrial‐scale top‐blown smelting furnace

“…where S ij stands for the rate-of-strain tensor and is listed in Equation (10). α Ã and α Ã ∞ represent the constant with a value of 1 for high-Reynolds numbers flow.…”

“…For instance, the requirement of a swirler in the application of the top blowing process is that the produced swirling flows can cool down the temperature of the pipe, increase the convective mixing and diffusion mixing efficiency of the fluid, enhance the radial stirring intensity for the liquid, and keep the sufficiently high axial momentum energy of the gas. [9][10][11] In fact, the annular pipe in the top blowing flow has a short service life with the failure model of the practical bending and tip burning [12] due to the insufficient protection of the swirling flow to the wall of the annular pipe. Thus, the optimization of the swirl-generating device is still a huge challenge, attributed to the limitation of the complex structure of the furnace, turbulent regime flow in-furnace, and the high temperature/pressure operating condition in the industrial equipment.…”

Transport Phenomena in Copper Bath Smelting and Converting Processes – A Review of Experimental and Modeling Studies

“…In the ISASMELT furnace, according to the CFD modeling work of Zhao et al, the mixing time generally decreases with an increasing gas flow rate (Zhao et al 2019b). A noteworthy point is that, in this case, as the gas flow rate increased to a certain range, mixing would become relatively slow.…”

“…A two-phase, top-blown ISASMELT furnace was modeled using CFD simulation by Zhao et al in 2019(Zhao et al 2019b). Different submersion depths and lance diameters were analyzed in order to optimize the lance arrangement.…”

Measurement and physical model prediction on splash fluxes in a pilot TSL bath smelting furnace

“…Through CFD simulations, Obiso et al (2019) showed that density, viscosity and surface tension of liquid, injection gas rate and lance were key factors influencing operations of TSL furnaces. Zhao et al (2019) carried out water modelling and CFD simulations and found that the bath mixing time in a TSL furnace was controlled by liquid velocity and turbulence viscosity, and that an injection lance with swirl plate gave slightly longer mixing times than that without swirl plate.…”