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National
Metallurgical Laboratory, Jamshedpur, Tata Steel, Jamshedpur and R&D Centre
for Iron & Steel (SAIL), Ranchi, have worked together to execute the project, "Maximising blast furnace productivity with Indian iron ore" as part of a national initiative, with major financial support from the Ministry of Steel, Govt. of India, to enhance the competitiveness of our iron and steel sector. This project aimed at development
of a knowledge-base for characterising the process dynamics of the iron making blast furnace to improve the furnace performance, especially its productivity.
The
programme was comprised of three major components, namely (a) Development of blast
furnace process models for creation of knowledge base, (b) Experimental
investigations in laboratory and plant measurements, and (c) Development and
installation of technology for plant operations. Two furnaces namely BF-G, Tata
Steel and BF-5, BSL, Bokaro were designated for this purpose with provision for
installation of sophisticated probes (under burden, vertical and tuyers) for the
first time in India.
The
blast furnace being a very complex reactor with physical, physico-chemical and
thermo–physical phenomena taking place in a highly coupled fashion,
mathematical representation of the process through a single model is practically
unmanageable proposition. Accordingly,
it was sub-divided into the development of three sub-models namely:(a) Burden
distribution Model, (b) Flow model (c) Thermo-chemical model.
To
meet the challenge and address the enormity, we at NML made an extensive search
for identifying expert researchers all over the country and succeeded in
creating a "Team India" for working on various components of the
project.
In
order to generate critically important data for development/ tuning/ validation
of the process models, several experimental investigations were carried out in
the laboratory and in-plant measurements were also conducted, wherever
necessary.
The
knowledge base generated through the process models and the experimental
investigations have led to the development of a technology, Real Time Process
Simulator (RTPS), for continuous prediction/ monitoring of the process dynamics
of blast furnace on real time. This
technology, developed for the first time in India, embeds a GUI along with the
fuzzy logic based modules for irregularity prediction. All the process models
and RTPS have been successfully tuned and installed at BF.5 BSL, Bokaro.
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