Abstract
The blast furnace casthouse is a typical heavy-polluting factory building of a steel enterprise. During the tapping process and the taphole opening, the dust concentration in the factory building's workroom can reach tens of thousands mg/m³. Over time, the air pollutants in the workplace can have unwanted consequences on employees' health. This paper selected a typical blast furnace tapping workshop and measured on-site the characteristics of the wind speed distribution, temperature distribution, and soot concentration distribution during the taping period. A numerical simulation model was established to analyze the taphole smoke exhaust system's performance based on computational fluid dynamics. The findings are: the velocity, temperature, and smoke density distributions in the workplace were very uneven, and the thermal comfort of the workers' area was relatively poor. Also, the concentration of PM2.5 was mostly below 80μg/m³. Besides, due to the plant's on-site measurement, real data was obtained for numerical simulation verification, making the evaluation of the entire plant's ventilation performance more reliable. Hence, this article's finding provides a scientific basis for optimizing the air distribution in the blast furnace cast house's workplace.
Numerical evaluation of the performances of the ventilation system in a blast furnace casthouse
