Coal reactivity under blast furnace conditions - Experiments and CFD

Abstract

Application of multi-scale, multi-physics Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to lab scale equipment provides a unique possibility to obtain additional insight to the occurring phenomena and can help to understand and explain experimental results. Reproducing blast furnace conditions in a lab scale set-up and extracting coal reactivity data under these conditions is a challenging task. Suitable CFD models can support the verification of the prevailing conditions in such equipment. During a research stay at the Combustion Research Facility of the Sandia National Laboratories, a digital twin of Sandia’s Pressurized Entrained Flow Reactor (PEFR) was created. The twin was then used to investigate gasification experiments of coal char particles previously conducted in the PEFR. The modelling results revealed significant inhomogeneity in the temperature and flow field and residence times deviating from plug flow assumption, vastly influencing the evaluation of experimental data, e.g., extraction of kinetic parameters. These lessons learned are incorporated into sophisticated evaluation methods for a new Alternative Reducing Agents (ARA) Reactor jointly developed by voestalpine Stahl, voestalpine Stahl Donawitz, Primetals Technologies Austria, TU Vienna, and K1-MET.