Since the foundation of our department we have a strong dedication to validate all new numerical models with in house lab experiments.
As it is not easy to extract quantitative data from multiphase flow experiments, the validation of numerical models needs some creativity and quite often one has to leave the established methods and find some new approaches on qualitative or pseudo quantitative data processing methods. Thus, we developed a strong focus on image and signal processing of experimental data, and over the last years we also managed to transfer some of these methods to real plant data. Some examples can be found below and in our annual reports.
Fluid mechanics laboratory
Contact
DI Dr. Stefan Puttinger
stefan.puttinger@jku.at
Location
Science Park 1, Ground Floor
The raceway areas in a blast furnace are highly dynamic structures and are subject to collapsing from time to time because of the downward movement of the burden. These events can result in reduced gas throughput and incomplete burning of fuel substitutes like pulverized coal. Due to the harsh environment in a blast furnace there is only very few plant data available about the process.
This study aims to find an optimal blockage detection based on the combination of hot blast flow rates and additional tuyere cameras. A usual implementation of triggering the shutdown of PCI lances is to use a threshold value for a minimum wind flow rate through the individual tuyere sections. However, a blast furnace never shows exact axially symmetric behavior, thus the hot blast flow rates vary between the tuyeres. So applying the same threshold level to all tuyeres is not an optimal solution to trigger the shutdown of PCI lances. Within this K1Met project we test various approaches for signal and image processing of available blast furnace data to optimize raceway blockage detection.
Highly laden particle jets occur in many industrial applications like burners for solid fuels.
Our laboratory test facility allows to investigate highly laden powder injection in a crossflow wind tunnel via high-speed camera and particle image velocimetry (PIV).