Transient thermo-mechanical modeling of real-scale metallurgical converter preheating

Modelling the thermal dynamics occurring during the converter preheat treatment step of a metallurgical process on a real-time processing scale is numerically complex and challenging for detailed time-resolved analysis. Physical phenomena within the fluid phase with turbulent combustion in the systems with gaseous fuel, are numerically expensive due to prevailing time scales. Arbitrary real-scale geometries consisting, in addition to the fluid zone, of multiple solid regions with different physical properties and the interaction between them, are another influential factor for the geometry size and its modeling complexity. Furthermore, high temperatures lead to thermal stress in the material, as the result of thermal expansion, which in the last consequence can cause material failure affecting the reliability of the entire system. This paper describes the implemented computationally efficient formulation of the transient multi-region solver with turbulent combustion based on the flamelet approach and the evaluation of the thermal and mechanical stresses in an industrial application within the finite volume method.