In order to increase the life of blast furnaces, the wall of blast furnaces must be equipped with cooling equipment. The cooling stave is commonly manufactured with cast iron, steel and copper as cooling materials. Among them, copper is widely used as a cooling stave material in blast furnaces because it has good thermal conductivity and high cooling capacity.
The structure and size of the copper cooling stave depend on the structure, size and operation characteristics of the blast furnace. A HIsmelt (high-intensity smelt) furnace has some differences from conventional ones in the fuel used and in the structure.
In order to manufacture a copper cooling stave for the HIsmelt furnace, O Song Ryong, a student at the Faculty of Materials Science and Technology, has designed its optimal structure for safe operation and its casting process.
For the design of the copper cooling stave, he determined the diameter of a copper tube installed in it and its arrangement, the wall thickness and the flow rate of cooling water according to the size. He examined the stability of the copper cooling stave by simulating the cooling capacity under the HIsmelt furnace operating conditions using Fluid Flow (Fluent) of Ansys Workbench programme (version 15).
For the design of the casting process, he made a casting plan and simulated on ProCAST the occlusion of flow channel of the cooling water due to the melting of the copper pipe in the mold during casting and solidification of the molten metal and the supply of cooling agent to prevent the separation of the cooling stave and the copper pipe. The cooling agent was determined to be water (94%) + air (6%).
For more information, please refer to his paper “Structure and Casting Process Optimization of Inclined Copper Cooling Stave for Hismelt Furnace Using Process Simulation Based on Taguchi Method” in “International Journal of Metal casting” (SCI).
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