Abstract
The hot-blast stove in steel mills is an enormous heat exchanger for sending hot air to the blast furnace. The hot-blast stove must be continued to operate, while the blast furnace is running. One of the causes of shutdown of hot-blast stove is an accident due to the damage of the refractory. It is important to know the life of the refractory material to protect the iron skin, for the prevention of accidents.
The authors have proposed an inverse analysis method to estimate the thickness of the refractory from the delay time due to heat conduction. This paper describes a method for determining the thickness of the refractory of the hot-blast stove using the temperature change in the furnace caused by the operation. First, focusing on the temperature change of the casing, we examined how to extract the damaged part of the refractory. Secondly, we examined how to remove the influence of the noise from the measurement data in order to accurately obtain a delay time due to heat conduction. Further,we estimated the thickness of the refractory, using the proposed method. It was found that the thickness can be estimated by the proposed method with good accuracy.
