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Porosity distribution of moving burden layers in the blast furnace throat

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Abstract

The porosity distribution of burden layers in the blast furnace (BF) plays an important role for the gas distribution and gas–solid two-phase interaction. In this work, the porosity distribution along the radial and vertical directions of the BF throat was studied by the discrete element method combined with some experimental verification. The simulated radial porosity distribution of coke burden layer shows general agreement with experimental findings, which in practice depends on the charging matrix. When a layer of burden moves from the top to the bottom, its structure will become more compact, so the porosity will decrease. However, the changes occur while 4–5 new layers are built on top of the layer in question, after which the porosity stabilized at an equilibrium point. For the full burden bed, the porosity of coke layers is larger than that of ore layers, but both layers have larger porosity than mixed layer formed by sinter charged on coke, especially when the particle size difference between ore and coke is large.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from The Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning (No. TP2015039), National 111 Project (The Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to University), Grant Award Number: D17002, The Open Project Program of Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Engineering & Resource Recycling (Anhui University of Technology) No: SKF20-01 and Project No: 51974182 supported by NSFC. The discrete element method simulations and analysis were conducted using LIGGGHTS 3.5.0 open source.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Special Steel, Shanghai Key Laboratory of Advanced Ferrometallurgy, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Han Wei, Weitian Ding, Ying Li, Hao Nie & Yaowei Yu

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Thermal and Flow Engineering Laboratory, Åbo Akademi University, Biskopsgatan 8, FI-20500, Åbo, Turku, Finland

    Henrik Saxén

  3. Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Metallurgical Engineering and Resources Recylcing, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan, China

    Hongming Long

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  1. Han Wei
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Wei, H., Ding, W., Li, Y. et al. Porosity distribution of moving burden layers in the blast furnace throat. Granular Matter 23, 10 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-020-01080-4

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