Development of Three-dimensional Thermo-fluid Numerical Model for Steam Drum of a Basic Oxygen Furnace

Abstract

− The efficient steam drum should be required to reduce carbon oxide emissions and heat recovery in oxygen converter hood system. However, steam generation is limited to the time of the oxygen blowing period, which is intermittent or cyclical in operation of steel-making process. Thus, steam drum should be optimized for an effective steam generation during the oxygen blowing portion of the converter cycle. In this study, a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been developed to describe the impacts of changing various operating conditions and geometric shape on thermo-fluid characteristics and performance of the steam drum. This model encompasses not only fluid flow and heat transfer but also evaporation and condensation at the interfacial surface in the steam drum by using VOF (Volume of Fluid) method. To validate the prediction performance of this model, comparison of the steam flow rate between numerical and experimental result has been performed, resulting in the accuracy of the relative error by less than 3.2%.