EnCata carried out advanced CFD and FEA simulations to help an industrial manufacturer analyze heat and gas flow in a copper smelting furnace. The insights revealed inefficiencies, guided geometry improvements, and supported modernization across TRL 1–9.
Industry:
Services:
TRL:
1 → 9
Project duration:
9 months
The core challenges of the project:
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For the first 3 weeks of the project, our team was not involved in modeling and design. We looked at the technological process itself and characteristics of the products created during its various stages. Our objective was not to fully comprehend the furnace process, but to dissect it into its constituent parts and focus solely on those that affected productivity.
The customer's losses from production downtime were directly related to the project duration. As a result, the team had to make trade-offs between the tasks. The utmost importance was given to the procedures that directly affected the final simulation model. For instance, the calculation of the temperature field was used to build the gas circuit instead of modeling sulfate corrosion. The areas where there was a risk of sulfate corrosion were determined through the temperature field analysis.
Understanding the technological processes that occur in a specific furnace area allowed us to simplify the calculating geometry. For example, just part of the basic geometry was analyzed when modeling the hydrodynamics of melt bubbling. The boundaries separating the calculating area from neighboring recurring areas were defined as symmetry boundaries. By simplifying calculations, we sped up modeling while maintaining calculation accuracy.
A research supercomputer was utilized for the majority of simulation runs since the size of the furnace (length 21 meters and height of the melting shop 9 meters) and tuyeres (diameter 0.2 m) blowing the gas mixture at a near-sonic speed precluded utilizing normal methods of model development. About 50 iterations were performed for the main model. For further models, our team performed a great number of tiny iterations.
The combination of heat and mass transfer processes with phase transitions is not recorded by sensors during furnace operation and is also little studied by the scientific community. Therefore, the impossibility of conducting a real experiment of boiling processes was expected. The solution was to determine the required parameters through process simulation. For instance, to gauge the intensity of melt spattering in the furnace, we assessed the average quantity of spattered slag in the control zone above the melt during the simulation.
We delivered a validated parametric model of the Vanyukov furnace, capturing thermal, hydrodynamic, and aerodynamic processes. The project included 12 geometry variants, two separately modeled critical zones, and over 3,000 hours of simulation time. Results were compiled into a 200-page engineering report, accompanied by all simulation files and optimized 3D geometries to support the client’s modernization efforts.
The furnace manufacturer implemented EnCata’s findings and improved the efficiency of internal processes.
If you're working on process improvements or equipment optimization, feel free to contact us to discuss how CFD and FEA simulations might support your project.
total compute time for simulation runs
to get the final validated model
size of the result files
