LIGGGHTS and EDEM application on charging system of ironmaking blast furnace

- DEM simulates charging system of blast furnace and results show correspondent with experiment results.
- LIGGGHTS 3.4.0 reproduces the similar results like the commercial software (EDEM 2.2.1).
- Pellet velocities in the chute are illustrated at chute angles = 45° in experiments and simulation.
- Reducing shear modulus is a reasonable way to speed up the calculation.

Chemical reactions between gas and raw material are determined by burden distribution, especially radial distribution of pellet/sinter and coke in blast furnace. An appropriate control of burden distribution is required to yield a smooth operation with effective performance and an appropriate gas flow at the wall. This paper studies two different DEM packages application for charing system of ironmaking blast furnace. The simulations (EDEM 2.2.1 and LIGGGHTS 3.4.0) based on the discrete element method (DEM), are validated using mass fraction distribution in the trajectory of pellet flow and burden distributions of pellet on a horizontal plane. The results show that good agreements are found among EDEM, experiment and LIGGGHTS. Furthermore, reducing shear modulus of material can increase calculation speed of DEM.

Comparison of velocities in experiment (squares for individual points, average as solid line) and simulation (blue for EDEM, red line for LIGGGHTS) at α = 45° for pellets.139