Effect of oxygen lance seat arrangement on flow characteristics of large-scale copper smelting bottom-blown furnace

Abstract

Large-scale copper smelting bottom-blown furnace (BBF) plays an important role in the modern copper smelting industry. Compared with small and medium-sized BBFs, the characteristics of oxygen lances have changed greatly. Pneumatic mixing with the oxygen lance seat as a blowing unit has become a disturbance source in the furnace. The arrangement of the oxygen lance seat directly affects the smelting effect of large-scale BBF. This paper takes a large BBF in a smelter as the research object, establishes a local model based on the lance seat, and analyzes the influence of two oxygen lance seat parameters on the flow characteristics of the molten pool through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulation. The results show that the lance seat angle and the distance between two oxygen lances have significant effects on the bubble floating path and the effective mixing zone range, respectively. Reducing the lance seat angle appropriately will extend the bubble floating movement space, and increasing the distance between two lances appropriately will weaken the overlap of the effective mixing zone. Rotating the furnace body or resetting oxygen lances is recommended, which is conducive to strengthening the smelting process of large BBF.

Keywords

copper smelting / large bottom-blown furnace / oxygen lance seat / VOF model / flow characteristics

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