Toward an understanding of coal combustion in blast furnace tuyere injection

The former Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited, along with its successors BlueScope Steel and BHP Billiton, like many of their iron and steel making counterparts, has had a long history of investigating pulverised coal injection and combustion under the conditions of blast furnace tuyere injection. A succession of pilot scale hot models and combustion test rigs have been constructed and operated at the company's Newcastle Laboratories beginning with the pilot scale hot raceway model in 1981. Each successive generation of test rig has attempted to provide a closer approximation to the actual blast furnace situation with the current test rig (1998 to present) seeking to promote an 'expanding' combusting coal plume. Test rig configuration is demonstrated to have a significant effect on coal burnout at a nominal transit time of 20 ms. The development of the combustion test rigs has been supported through the co-development of a range of sampling and measuring techniques and the application of a number of numerical combustion models. This paper reviews some of the milestones along the path of these investigations, the current understandings and what the future potentially holds. It's not solved yet! (c) 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.