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Quicklime is an essential reducing agent in the steel smelting process and its calcination from limestone is accompanied by considerable energy consumption. As a relatively economical lime kiln, the Parallel Flow Regenerative (PFR) lime kiln is used as the main equipment for the production of quicklime by various steel industries. PFR lime kilns generally use natural gas as the fuel gas. Although natural gas has a high calorific value and is effective in calcination, with the increasing price of natural gas and the pressure saves energy and protect the environment, it makes sense of exploring the use of cleaner energy sources or other sub-products as fuel gas. The use of blast furnace gas (BFG) as a low calorific value fuel gas produced in the steel smelting process has been of interest. This paper therefore develops a set of mathematical models for gas-solid heat transfer and limestone decomposition based on a Porous Medium Model (PMM) and a Shrinking Core Model (SCM) to numerically simulate a PFR lime kiln using BFG in order to investigate the feasibility of calcining limestone with low calorific fuel gas and to provide a valuable reference for future development of such processes and the kiln structure improvement.

Limestone of different particle sizes is often calcined together to improve production efficiency, but the calcination effect of mixed particle size limestone is difficult to guarantee. To investigate the effect of different particle size combinations on calcination, this study uses a porous media model and a shrinking core model to simulate the calcination process for a single particle size and two mixed particle sizes in a Parallel Flow Regenerative lime kiln (PFR lime kiln). The results of the study show that an increase in void fraction has a small effect on the gas temperature. The temperature also does not change with particle sizes. At the same time, the decomposition is poor near the wall and better the closer to the center of the calcination zone. In addition, when the particle sizes differ by 2 times, the decomposition of small limestone particles had less influence, and the decomposition of large particles was also better. When the particle sizes differ by 3 times, the decomposition of both limestone sizes is more affected, especially for the larger limestone size, where only the outer surface is involved in the decomposition.

The main objective of this paper is to establish a mathematical framework to analyze the complex thermal economic performance of the calcination process. To find the factors affecting exergy efficiency loss, different exergy destruction is investigated in detail. Furthermore, the exergy flow cost model for exergy cost saving has also been developed. The results show that the vertical shaft furnace is a self-sufficiency equipment without additional fuel required, but the overall exergy destruction accounts for 54.11% of the total exergy input. In addition, the energy efficiency of the waste heat recovery boiler and thermal deaerator are 83.52% and 96.40%, whereas the exergy efficiency of the two equipment are 65.98% and 94.27%. Furthermore, the import exergy flow cost of vertical shaft furnace, waste heat recovery boiler and thermal deaerator are 366.5197 RMB per MJ, 0.1426 RMB per MJ, and 0.0020 RMB per MJ, respectively. Based on the result, several suggestions were proposed to improve the exergoeconomic performance. Assessing the performance of suggested improvements, the total exergy destruction of vertical shaft furnace is reduced to 134.34 GJ per hours and the exergy efficiency of waste heat recovery boiler is raised up to 66.02%. Moreover, the import exergy flow cost of the three different equipment is reduced to 0.0329 RMB per MJ, 0.1304 RMB per MJ, and 0.0002 RMB per MJ, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A walking beam type reheating furnace with advanced control technology has been evaluated by combined energy and exergy analysis. In order to gain insight into the performance of the present furnace, the results of energy analysis are compared with those in published papers and the irreversibility of the furnace is analyzed via exergy destruction calculation. The results show that slabs preheated before charged into the furnace can save fuel and improve energy utilization. The structure and material of the wall and roof show good thermal insulation. However, the oxidized scale is a little more and the temperature of flue gas is high in the present reheating furnace. The energy efficiency of the furnace is 71.01%, while exergy efficiency is 51.41%, indicating a potential for energy-saving improvements of the present furnace. The exergy destruction of the furnace accounts for 28.36% of total exergy input which is mainly caused by heat transfer through a finite temperature difference (14.71%), fuel combustion (11.66%), and scale formation (1.99%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]