The Effect of Cooling Staves on the Burden Flow in the Ironmaking Blast Furnace

The ironmaking blast furnace is a complex high temperature, high pressure, multiphase flow reactor with an inner volume of up to 6000 m3, used to produce raw and molten iron, also known as pig iron. This research explores the interaction of the granular material inside a blast furnace, namely iron ore and coke, with its internal stave coolers, which are attached to the blast furnace’s inner walls. The descent of the ore and coke particles is modelled by computational methods and scaled cold blast furnace experiments, from which information about the flow structure and particle-wall interaction forces is obtained.