CFD Modelling of Reactive Injection in Metallurgy

Ir. Bart Vandensande, Dr. Sander Arnout, Dr. Els Nagels

Several state-of-the-art metallurgical reactors such as Top Submerged Lance, QSL, Submerged Plasma furnaces, and Pierce-Smith convertors, use injection of gases to drive the reaction. To optimize the layout and to design optimal reactors, CFD (computational fluid dynamics) modelling can provide valuable insight. However, several phenomena play a role and interact intimately, which leads to computational challenges of all combining these phenomena in one simulation. In this paper, examples are shown of the coupling between reactions and multiphase flows for metallurgical processes with gas-injection. This is done with a bottom up literature review approach. The different necessary submodules (turbulence, multiphase and reactions) of a reactive CFD model are discussed. From an illustrative overview of the literature, the state-of-the-art and its limitations are described.