Flow dynamics study in bottom blown copper smelting furnace

The first commercial bottom blown oxygen copper smelting furnace has been installed and operated at Dongying Fangyuan Nonferrous Metals (China) for 4 years. This new copper smelting technology shows a number of advantages including high productivity, low slag rate, high copper recovery and energy sufficiency. These advantages are with the flow dynamics of the bottom blown furnace. This paper reports an investigation into a 1:12 bottom blown furnace model set up at the University of Queensland to examine the novel features of the original furnace. In this paper, the mixing time in the bottom blown furnace model was investigated. As a first approximation Ar gas was injected from the bottom of the water bath to study the effects of gas flow rate and bath depth on mixing time. KCl solution, introduced from above the plume, was used as a tracer for continuous measurement of electrical conductivity as a mean to determine the mixing time. The preliminary correlations among mixing time, stirring energy, gas flow rate, and bath depth have been obtained for the bottom blown furnace. It was found that mixing time decreases with increasing gas flow rate and bath depth. The information from the cold model will be useful for design of the oxygen lances for the industrial furnace.