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Review and Analysis of Metallurgical Processes in Blast Furnace Main Trough and Trough Performances

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Abstract

Considerable efforts have been made in the academia, industry and R&D to investigate metallurgical processes in blast furnace main trough (BFT) and trough performances. In these, while the emphasis in industrial research has been primarily on the mechanism of BFT refractory degradation as well as the development of high-performance refractory formulations, noteworthy efforts in the academia have been parallelly made to study air-hot metal-slag flows, jetting and splashing behaviour, slag-metal separation, flow stresses on refractory walls, temperature distribution, and so on. CFD (computational fluid dynamics), physical modelling and high-temperature field trials have all been extensively applied to investigate diverse phenomena in blast furnace trough. In the present work, four decades of research and a large number of archival publications on blast furnace trough (BFT) have been reviewed and analysed primarily to document the state of the art and identify knowledge-gaps that continue to exist. In such context, many studies reveal that oxidation of refractory lining along metal-line and chemical reaction together with mass transfer along the slag-line are primarily responsible for trough refractory degradation wherein, multi-phase flows of air-hot metal and slag, particularly in the jet entry region, play important roles. CFD studies coupled with industrial-scale measurements have conclusively demonstrated that wear, erosion, dissolution, etc. of trough refractory are the combined result of fluid flow as well as heat and mass transfer phenomena and therefore, characterisation of refractory degradation solely in terms of mechanical or flow stresses is not justified. Many modelling and experimental studies have further indicated that while refractory formulation and layout determine thermal fields within trough refractory lining and influence latter’s service life, physical dimensions and design of the main trough, on the other hand, tend to exert considerable influence on metal loss and slag entrainment phenomena. Plant scale trials have shown that blast furnace operating parameters, most importantly, throughput rate and hot metal temperature exert considerable influence on BFT refractory performance. As a consequence, trough refractory formulation and design have undergone many changes over the years resulting in the development of Al2O3–SiC–C based castables and thereby, fulfilling many requirements of the modern-day blast furnace ironmaking practices. In addition to such, the present review has indicated that sustained R&D efforts in industry helped produce BFT castables with controlled porosity and particle size distribution leading to considerable performance enhancement and specific refractory consumption, as low as 0.35 kg per tonne of hot metal. The review has brought out that collaborative research, between industry and academia, has been fruitful towards many developments presented in the review.

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Notes

  1. The present authors’ observation from a number of iron and steel industries appear to indicate that from the time tapping ensues, slag starts to show-up in the tapping stream at different instants of time (typically within the first 10–30 min), depending on the size of the blast furnace.

  2. These include dispersion of slag droplets and their advection to refractory walls, widespread C–O reaction between entrained air and dissolved carbon in hot metal, escape of hot N2 and CO gases at slag line and so on.

  3. In this work, at several places in the text, “wear” has been loosely used to imply refractory degradation due to combined effect of mechanical, thermal and chemical forces.

  4. Plant data collected during the course of present study suggests that for a 4000 m3 blast furnace equipped with a 60 mm diameter tap-hole, tapping or throughput rate can be ~ 2 tonnes/minute at the beginning of a particular cast, changing gradually and attaining a maximum value of about 7 tonnes/min and then tapering off finally to the initial 2 tonnes /min mark, before closure of the tap-hole. These, as one would note here, make boundary condition at the tap hole outlet time dependant, rather than time invariant.

  5. With respect to various trough refractory formulations currently applied, position of the 1150 ~ 1250 oC iso-therm is generally considered to be having considerable bearing on trough refractory performance [14, 15].

  6. An assumption of perfect contact, between refractory and hot-metal, implies refractory surface temperature to be equivalent to hot-metal temperature.

  7. Half- way through tapping and beyond, hot blast is often entrained by the flowing hot metal producing a two-phase, gas + liquid flow in the blast furnace tap hole.

  8. These primarily involved melting of blast furnace slag in a crucible made from trough-castables and studying the extent of crucible-slag interactions by subjecting used crucible refractories, at the end of an experiment, to various characterisation methods.

  9. A simple hand calculation considering Ljet = 5 m, Dorf. = 0.075 m and orifice velocity of 7.5 m/s [4] suggest that volumetric entrainment rate of air can be as much as 58% of liquid volumetric flow rate! Given that liquid through- put rate is appreciable in practice, enormous volume of air can thus be entrained by the “hotmetal-slag jet” during its passage through the ambient.

  10. One such reaction is likely to be oxidation of SiC, by MgO, and consequent formation of silicon suboxide or, silica [19], depending on prevalent temperature and CO partial pressure.

Abbreviations

\(C_{i}^{{{\text{sat}}}}\) :

Saturation concentration of refractory component ‘i’ in molten slag

\(C_{i}^{{{\text{init}}}}\) :

Concentration of refractory component ‘i’ in the bulk slag

\(c_{{{\text{of}}}}\) :

Final concentration of oil

\(c_{{{\text{oi}}}}\) :

Initial concentration of oil

\(C_{{\text{p}}}\) :

Specific heat capacity

\(D\) :

Diffusion coefficient of refractory component ‘i’ in the bulk slag

\(D_{{{\text{jet}}}}\) :

Diameter of nozzle/taphole

\(Fr_{{{\text{jet}}}}\) :

Jet Froud number

\(g\) :

Acceleration due to gravity

\(H_{{\text{b}}}\) :

Thickness or depth of upper buoyant phase in model trough

\(H_{{\text{w}}}\) :

Height or depth of lower phase (water) in model trough

\(k_{{\text{m}}}\) :

Mass transfer coefficient

\(K\) :

Thermal conductivity

\(l\) :

Refractory lining thickness

\(L\) :

Characteristic length

\(L_{{{\text{jet}}}}\) :

Length of jet stream

\(Pr_{{\text{t}}}\) :

Prandtl number

\(Q_{{{\text{air}}}}\) :

Volumetric rate of entrained air

\(Q_{{{\text{liq}}}}\) :

Volumetric flow rate of liquid jet

S:

Volumetric rate of heat generation

\(t\) :

Time

\(T\) :

Temperature

\(u_{{\text{j}}}\) :

Velocity component in j direction

\(u_{{\text{w}}}\) :

Average velocity of lower phase (water) in model trough

\(v\) :

Fluid flow speed

\(v_{{\text{b}}}\) :

Velocity of upper buoyant phase in model trough

\(V_{{\text{g}}}\) :

Gas superficial velocity at the taphole

\(V_{{\text{l}}}\) :

Liquid superficial velocity at the taphole

\(x\) :

Horizontal distance from the taphole

\(x_{{\text{j}}}\) :

Cartesian coordinate notation

\(y\) :

Projectile motion coordinate of the taphole stream

\(y_{{\text{o}}}\) :

Initial height of taphole stream from the bottom of main trough

\(\rho_{{\text{b}}}\) :

Density of upper buoyant phase in model trough

\(\mu\) :

Dynamic viscosity of the slag

\(\mu_{{\text{b}}}\) :

Viscosity of upper buoyant phase in model trough

\(\rho\) :

Density

\(\rho_{{\text{w}}}\) :

Density of lower phase (water) in model trough

\(\theta\) :

Taphole tilt angle

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, 208016, India

    Subham Ranjan & Dipak Mazumdar

  2. Calderys India Refractories Limited, Sadar, Nagpur, India

    Indra Nath Chakraborty, Saumen Sinha & Raja Sarkar

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  1. Subham Ranjan
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Ranjan, S., Mazumdar, D., Chakraborty, I.N. et al. Review and Analysis of Metallurgical Processes in Blast Furnace Main Trough and Trough Performances. Trans Indian Inst Met 75, 589–611 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12666-021-02454-9

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