Research On The 3D Design System For Hot Blast Stove

With the rapid development of the 3D CAD technology, 3D CAD systems are more and more widely used in engineering design. The traditional hot blast stove design process suffers from its low efficiency because the stoves are often designed with two-dimensional CAD systems and a large number of repetitive design tasks are completed manually by design engineers. In order to improve the efficiency of design, a 3D design software system for hot blast stove is developed and some key techniques used in this software development are presented in this paper.Structures of hot blast stoves are complex and rules for their brick masonry are of variable types. In this research, several typical brick layout methods are developed after summarizing traditional methods used for a number of hot blast stove cases and taking into account design flows, design habits and other requirements. The interactive design is one of the major methods, which is convenient in a 3D CAD system. The masonry operations can be successfully completed after engineering staffs specify the information of brick sizes and brick locations. These methods proposed in this paper can greatly improve efficiency and reduce design cycles.A hot blast stove needs to use many kinds of refractory bricks, whose parameters are close to each other. This makes the management of the brick library difficult. In order to minimize the size of the brick library and reduce costs, an optimization program is developed to choose bricks from the brick library. Based on a careful analysis on the related issues, the mathematical model is established. After that, the genetic algorithm based on real number encoding is introduced to solve the optimization problem, in which, selection, crossover and mutation operations of genetic algorithms and other operation parameters are designed. When brick collections selected from the brick library meet given constraints, the type number in the collections is minimal. After verifying through a practical example, a satisfactory result is obtained.Based on the above research, a three-dimensional design system for hot blast stoves is developed with the VC 2003 platform and COM component technologies. The system realizes three-dimensional modeling, masonry and two-dimensional drawing output. The system also reduces workload and improves the efficiency of the design.