from the conferences organized by TANGER Ltd.
Continuous steel reheating furnaces belong to high-energy consumption units and an optimization of their operation can thus bring significant economic and ecological benefits. Numerical modelling is one of the tools for an optimization of a design, process parameters and operation control of the furnaces. A 3D zonal model of a continuous gas burners heated walking-beam furnace is introduced in this contribution. A solution of heat transfer process in the furnace is based on a Hottel zonal method and compartment based discretization. The solution includes convective and radiative heat transfer in the furnace including a participation of a semi-transparent gaseous furnace atmosphere. A method of direct measurement of a charge heating in a continuous walking beam furnace is presented. The method is based on a thermal-box barrier device, which allows temperature measurement of a tested beam during its entire passage throughout the furnace. Results obtained by the numerical simulation and the measurement are compared and a good agreement is confirmed. It is demonstrated that the presented zonal model is an effective tool, which can bring accurate enough results at a very acceptable time.
Keywords: Walking-beam furnace, steel reheating, radiation heat transfer, numerical model, zonal method, temperature measurement, thermal box-barrier© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.