Recovery of waste heat from sinter cooling process: simulation and optimisation

Abstract

In order to increase the amount of waste heat recovery, the cooling process of a layer loaded sinter cooler was simulated. Aiming to determine exactly the flow and temperature distributions in the sinter cooler, several high accuracy numerical models were coupled together to simulate the complex multidimensional physical phenomenon. Different particle sizes of sieved sinter were loaded in different layers of the cooler, and groups of simulation experiments were designed and performed. An orthogonal optimisation experiment was designed to evaluate the influence of the designed parameters (i.e. the inlet area and wall heat flux). The results showed that the inlet area and wall heat flux have significant influences on the recovery of waste heat, and a group of optimal parameters was obtained. A formula was developed by fitting the simulation results and test data and showed that the simulated results agreed well with the test data, which indicated that the current fitting formula can be used to predict the evolutions of sinter temperature at outlet as function of the cooling time.

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