Estimation of the Blast Furnace Hearth State Using an Inverse-Problem-Based Wear Model

An undisturbed and well-controlled hearth state is an essential prerequisite for achieving a long campaign life and low production costs in an ironmaking blast furnace, because hearth wear and hot metal and slag drainage are crucial factors in its operation. With the objective to estimate the hearth state of the refractory of a three-taphole blast furnace, a wear model of the hearth erosion and skull formation was developed. The model is based on thermocouple readings in the hearth lining and solves an inverse heat conduction problem for a series of co-axial vertical slices, where the erosion and skull lines are optimized simultaneously. The model is optimized for fast computation by adopting a novel procedure featuring fixed mesh during the looping calculation. The results revealed that the hearth refractory showed an elephant-foot-shaped profile with excessive erosion in the hearth periphery, indicating that liquid flows are suppressed in the hearth bottom and that the permeability of the core of the deadman is low. These findings were further elaborated and confirmed by a comparison between the estimated hearth state and other key operation variables, including the coke rate, blast kinetic energy, and residual carbon appetite of the hot metal.