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A real-time mathematical model for the two-dimensional temperature field of petroleum coke calcination in vertical shaft calciner was developed based on computational fluid dynamics. In the modeling process, the petroleum coke discharging process was described by the solid viscous flow, the dynamic heat flux boundary condition was adopted to specify the heat transfer between the flue wall and the gas in the flue, and the Arrhenius equation was used to characterize the pyrolysis process of petroleum coke. The model was validated with both measurement data and data from the literature. The effects of discharge rate per pot, volatile content of green coke, and excess air coefficient on the temperature field of the vertical shaft calciner were investigated with the use of the developed model. The following reasonable operating conditions were obtained: the discharge rate per pot should be less than 90 kg/h, the volatile content of green coke should be in the range of 9–11%, and the excess air coefficient should be in the range of 1.10–1.20. In this work, the governing equations were discretized by using the finite volume method, and the discrete linear equations were solved by using sparse matrix package UMFPACK. The model calculating process takes about less than 15 s. Therefore, the model is beneficial in realizing real-time online temperature detection of petroleum coke calcination in a vertical shaft calciner.

The aim of this work was to establish a mathematical model for the analysis of calcining process of petroleum coke in a 24-pot calciner via computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulation method. The model can be divided into two main parts (1) heterogeneous reacting flow of petroleum coke calcination in the pot was simulated using a two-fluid model approach where the gas and solid phase are treated as a continuous phases; and (2) the standard turbulence equations combined with the finite rate/eddy-dissipation combustion model and discrete ordinates model were solved for the turbulent gas reacting flow in the flue. The model of the calcining process was implemented in ANSYS Fluent 15.0 (commercial CFD software) and validated by industrial production data. After the validation research, the model has been applied to inspect the distribution features of the temperature field in the furnace, the concentration field of residual moisture and volatiles in the petroleum coke, and the vector velocity field of gas and solid phases. This research can provide a theoretical basis for optimizing the structure and improving the automatic control level of a pot calciner.