CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 35, 2013 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at: www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Petar Varbanov, Jiří Klemeš, Panos Seferlis, Athanasios I. Papadopoulos, Spyros Voutetakis Copyright © 2013, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l., ISBN 978-88-95608-26-6; ISSN 1974-9791 Investigation of Alternative Reducing Agent Injection into the Raceway of Blast Furnaces using CFD Christian Maier* ,a , Christian Jordan a , Michael E. Harasek a Christoph Feilmayr b , Christoph Thaler b a Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Chemical Engineering, Getreidemarkt 9/166, A-1060 Vienna b voestalpine Stahl GmbH, VOEST-ALPINE-Straße 3, Postfach 3, A-4020 Linz chmaier@mail.tuwien.ac.at CFD-models have been developed, implemented and validated to study the injection of plastics and heavy oil into the blast furnace raceway. Separate sets of conservation equations are solved for solid and gas phases, accounting also for heterogeneous transport phenomena. The model predictions deliver detailed insight to local conditions in the blast furnace and will be used for the optimisation of operating conditions, also aiming at further improvement of plant efficiency and economics. 1. Introduction The classical blast furnace process utilizes coke as the main reducing agent to produce molten iron from iron ore. A promising approach to decrease coke demands and therefore the consumption of primary resources is the introduction of alternative carbon carriers, injected via lances through the tuyères into the raceway of the blast furnace (Fu et al., 2011). A wide variety of alternative reducing agents such as oil, crude tar, natural gas and waste plastics is utilized by voestalpine Stahl GmbH in Linz (Austria). hot blast raceway coke, ore top gas hot metal slag Region observed tuyére with injection lances Figure 1: Scheme of the blast furnace, highlighting the zone under investigation (Maier et al., 2013). 1345 DOI: 10.3303/CET1335224 Please cite this article as: Maier C., Jordan C., Harasek M.E., Feilmayr C, Thaler C., 2013, Investigation of alternative reducing agent injection into the raceway of blast furnaces using cfd, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 35, 1345-1350 DOI:10.3303/