Heat Transfer Analysis in a Blast Furnace Tuyere Nose

The Blast furnace process is a counter current moving bed chemical reactor to reduce iron oxides to iron for iron/steel making. In the process, tuyeres are used to introduce hot air (blast) and fuel (gas or pulverized coal) into the furnace for combustion. The nose of a tuyere, composed of copper material, that is exposed to a high temperature environment and a cooling water pipe is embedded to prevent melting of the material. In this work, heat transfer and temperature distributions have been analyzed using the computational fluid dynamics commercial software, FLUENT®. The computations have included the cooling water flow and conjugate heat transfer in the tuyere nose. Both convection and radiation heat transfer on the surfaces are included. Different geometry and operating conditions were considered. The results have indicated that insufficient cooling in a large area between the nose inlet and outlet pipe can cause failures of the tuyere nose.