Abstract
The steel foundries with electric arc furnaces handling metal scraps have recently gained an attention as a potential source of dusts. The present study focuses on the analysis of dust emissions and removals during furnace charging and melting processes by commercial CFD software named FLUENT. A body fitted grid system consisting of 880,000 meshes was first generated by Gambit for the electric arc furnace with the capacity of 60 ton/cycle and then FLUENT was invoked to solve the corresponding NavierStokers equation for the momentum, temperature and dust concentration. The entire processes from metal charging to metal melting were simulated to investigate the unsteady behaviors of fluid flows and dust concentrations. The model simulation results showed that as the top of the electric arc furnace opened for metal charging, hot plumes bursted out from the furnace rose strongly by buoyance and escaped mostly through the main hood. Therefore, the capacity of main hoods determined the vent efficiency in the metal charging process. As the furnace was closed after the metal charging and the metal melting processes was followed, the hot flow stream stretching from the furnace to the main hood was dissipated fast and the flow from the inlet of the bottom of the left hand side to the main and monitoring hoods constituted the main stream. And there was only a slow flow in the right hand side of the furnace. Therefore, the dust concentrations were calculated higher in the left hand side of the furnace, which was consistent with observations.