Simulation of a sintering pellet

Abstract

This paper describes a simulation of the process of sintering an ore pellet placed in a high-temperature furnace. The sintering kinetics is described via a nonlinear ordinary differential equation with an ill- conditioned initial value. The change in temperature with time in the sintering pellet is described via a partial differential equation (conduction equation) which is coupled with the kinetic equation. The nu merical-solution approach is based on the recently developed repeated-extrapolation technique, which has been shown to be significantly faster than standard finite-difference algorithms. The partial differen tial equation is handled by the classical method of orthogonal eigenfunction expansions. The approach is illustrated by treating the sintering of uranium di oxide spherical pellets. The results clearly indi cate that a significant portion of the shrinkage takes place in the initial non-isothermal heating period. Since the conventional analysis of shrinkage data has been restricted to constant temperature conditions, the approach presented in this paper should lead to a more sophisticated treatment of sintering.