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Combustion space modeling of an aluminum furnace

Conference · · Light Metals (Proceedings)
OSTI ID:901682
Secondary aluminum production (melting from aluminum ingots, scraps, etc.) offers significant energy savings and environmental benefits over primary aluminum production since the former consumes only five percent of the energy used in the latter process. The industry, however, faces technical challenges of further improving furnace melting efficiency and has been lacking tools that can help understand combustion process in detail and that will facilitate furnace design. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling has played increasingly important roles in evaluating industrial processes. As part of a larger program run by SECAT, a CFD model has been developed at Argonne National Laboratory to simulate fuel combustion, heat transfer (including thermal radiation), gaseous product flow (mainly CO2 and H2O), and production/transport of pollutant species/greenhouse gases in an aluminum furnace. Using this code, the surface heat fluxes are calculated and then transferred to a melt code. In order to have a high level of confidence in the computed results, the output from the code will be compared and validated against in-furnace measurements made in the Albany furnace. Once validated, the combustion code may be used to perform inexpensive parametric studies to investigate methods to optimize furnace performance. This paper will present results from the combustion modeling of an aluminum furnace as well as results from several parametric studies.
Research Organization:
Albany Research Center (ARC), Albany, OR; SECAT (Lexington, KY); Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, IL); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; SECAT (Lexington, KY)
OSTI ID:
901682
Report Number(s):
DOE/ARC-2005-014
Conference Information:
Journal Name: Light Metals (Proceedings) Journal Volume: 2005
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English