Segregation Behavior Of Sinter In Vertically Arranged Cooler With DEM Simulation

Energy-saving and emission-reduction technologies are increasingly required in the iron and steel industry,which makes a request for efficient method on waste heat recovery.The vertically arranged sinter cooler represents an important technology to recover the sensible heat and reduce the dust pollution of the sintering process,therefore attracting much attention.However,due to the wide distribution of the sinter particles,segregation is very severe in current design,which greatly reduces the heat recovering efficiency.In order to reduce the segregation,the influence of the structure of feed tube is studied with the discrete element method(DEM).Due to the huge requirement of computing load,the graphics process unit(GPU)is adopted to accelerate the DEM simulation.The behavior of the sinter particles in an industrial scale vertically arranged sinter cooler is studied.Althought the sinter particles are mixed evenly in adding process,it shows that severe particle segregation occurs in the sinter cooler where the small and large sinter particles are mostly located at the center and periphery regions,respectively,which results from momentum difference of sinter particles with different diameter.The level of segregation would change with the structure of the feed tube.Three types of feed tube structures are designed and tested,showing that they could effectively change the segregation in both the horizontal and vertical directions of the sinter cooler.So the structure of the feed tube could reduce the segregation of the particles and optimize the recovery of the sensible heat accordingly.