Modeling and Simulation of Heat Transfer Phenomena in an Annular Cooler of Iron Ore Sintering Process

The iron ore sintering process is the second largest energy consuming process next to the blast furnace in overall integrated steel plant value chain. Sintering consists of two moving beds, namely a sintering machine, and an annular cooler. Once the sintering is completed, hot sinter is discharged on the annular cooler and air is blown from the bottom with blowers for cooling the sinter to normal temperature. The present work focuses on investigating the transient heat transfer phenomenon between cooling air and hot sinter for estimating the temperature profile of the moving sinter bed. An unsteady state, one-dimensional mathematical model is developed considering conservation of mass, momentum, and energy transfer. A parametric study is conducted to investigate the effect of various process conditions such as void fraction of bed, differential pressure below sinter cooler on temperature of gas and solid, velocity of gas, average bed temperature and heat transfer between gas and solid. The model validated with industrial process data showing a good agreement and the temperature profile along the cooler length is predicted for a real time process conditions.