Numerical Simulations of Industrial Melting Furnaces

A computational fluid dynamics code developed at Argonne National Laboratory was used to simulate turbulent mixing, combustion reaction, radiation heat transfer, and pollutant kinetics of the combustion flow in industrial melting furnaces. The code employs an integral approach to incorporate a lumped combustion reaction model in the flow calculation and a separate hybrid technique to perform pollutant kinetics calculations for NO_x and soot. The code validated with experimental data collected from industrial furnaces, was used to evaluate the impacts of burner operation conditions on the energy efficiency of furnaces. The results indicate that the furnace configuration has a significant effect on the combustion efficiency; the burner injection velocity affects the flow penetration and the species mixing; and the burner injection angle has a significant impact on the flow patterns and heat transfer. The study demonstrates that CFD can be a useful tool for analyzing the combustion flow of an industrial furnace.