Efficient Simulation of Gas Flow in Blast Furnace

Simulation of gas flow in a multilayered non-isothermal packed bed is useful for blast furnace operators in deciding appropriate charging strategy. While using an anisotropic form of Ergun equation to simulate gas flow through such systems, a new solution methodology for non-isothermal gas with varying density flowing through a layered burden has been proposed. This involves handling non-linearity due to gas density variation with pressure and temperature by solving for the square of pressure instead of pressure directly and handling the non-linearity due to |v| term in the Ergun equation by solving linearized form of Ergun equation and updating |v| iteratively. The proposed scheme is capable of predicting the effect of layer structure on gas flow with economy in number of grid points as well as computation time.