The Behavior of Impurities During Producer Gas Implementation as Alternative Fuel in Steel Reheating Furnaces: A CFD and Thermo-Chemical Study

The use of available and cheap industrial producer gases as alternative fuels for the steel reheating furnaces is an attractive topic for steel industry. The application of producer gases for such furnaces introduces not only the complicated combustion system of Low Calorific Value (LCV) gases, but also several impurities that could be problematic for the quality of final steel products. The quality of steel can be highly affected by the interaction of impurities with iron-oxides at hot slab surfaces. In this research, the combustion of producer gases and the behavior of impurities at the steel slab surface are studied by aid of a novel coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and thermodynamics approach. The impurities are introduced as mineral ash particles with the particle size distributions of 15–100 μm. The CFD predicted data regarding the accumulation of ash particles are extracted from an interface layer at the flaring gas media around the steel slab surface. Later on, these predicted data are used for the thermo-chemical calculations regarding the formation of sticky solutions and stable phases at the steel slab surface. The results show that the particles are more likely follow the flow due to the high injection velocity of fuel (70 m/s) and the dominant inertial forces. More than 90 percent of particles have been evacuated through the exhaust pipes. The only 10 percent of remaining particles due to the high recirculation zones at the middle of furnace and the impinging effect of front walls tend to stick to the side wall of slab in the heating zone more than the soaking zone.