• Innovative heat treatment of steel and associated design challenges for efficient thermal equipment – S. Vanderheyden

  • Authors: S. Vanderheyden

Summary

TOTeM 42 meeting has been organised on 24th and 25th June at the kind invitation of Tata Steel in IJmuiden and of the IFRF Dutch Committee - NVV. Included in the programme was also a site visit to the most efficient steel plant in Europe i.e. Tata Steel (ex-CORUS and ex-HOOGOVENS).

The theme of the meeting: "Industrial heating: furnaces, process heaters, kilns, design of safe and environmentally efficient thermal equipment" was covered with 13 presentations, 4 posters and two panel discussions. The meeting was comprised of the four sections chaired by Pepijn Pronk (Tata Steel, NVV), Tomasz Klajny (IFRF), Jacques Dugué (TOTAL) and Gerard Flament (IFRF), and covered various industries such as iron and steel, oil and gas, as well as cement and glass.

The Iron and Steel industry was addressed with presentations concerning reheating furnaces, annealing and galvanizing furnaces, hot stoves for blast furnaces, and travelling grates for pelletizing plants. These presentations highlighted issues like combustion induced vibrations and noise (hot stove fired with low calorific value Blast Furnace gas), NOx, Energy conservation (regenerative burners, radiant tube burners), larger use of BF gas or Flameless Oxidation systems.

The Oil and Gas industry was also well addressed and showed interest for low NOx burners/systems, the optimum combination of burner and furnace design, safety and search for better on line process control and automation.

Cement and Glass Furnaces were addressed by presentations showing the benefit of CFD modelling for NOx reduction and efficiency improvements.

Others discussed topics were trends for regular use of CFD models and continuous need for optimum burner/furnace design. The meeting provided an excellent opportunity for people from various industries relating to combustion and industrial heating to exchange the experiences as well as the knowledge about their difficulties and approaches to solving them.