Temperature and Flow Inside a High Temperature Kiln

In a funded project in cooperation with a manufacturer of highly corrosion resistant high temperature refractory materials (RATH AG) a new OpenFOAM® solver was developed to model heat transfer in a high temperature kiln. The kiln is operated up to 1750 °C, run in batch mode and fired using swirling methane-air burners. One of the project goals was decreasing consumption of fossil fuels while maintaining the high product quality. The combustion in the burner was simulated with the recently released edcSimpleFoam solver using a high quality model (local extinction or full EDC-combustion models are selectable in the solver). Interpolated profiles were used as boundary conditions for a separate simulation of the high temperature kiln in OpenFOAM®-1.7.1. Thus a pure open source solution for this task is available. This work presents results obtained when coupling the two OpenFOAM® solvers: edcSimpleFoam and cM3RFoam. It is shown that the Magnussen-type combustion solver in OpenFOAM® yields sensible results that can be used as reliable boundary conditions for the kiln simulation.

Improvements and suggestions concerning flow and temperature distribution were made for project partner RATH AG:

• Change of burner layout
• Modification of location of brick

These changes were implemented and a statistically significant improvement of quality of the products was achieved during the industrial production.