Assessing the crack sensitivity of hot gas duct elbow sections on electric arc furnaces

The analysis of a hot gas duct elbow section with the aid of the Finite Element Method (FEM) revealed that precisely those tubes in which cracking had also been observed in reality exhibited the greatest strains. A three-dimensional shell structure was used as a computer model for this purpose, with the thermal boundary conditions being derived from an independent simulation. Comparisons with a two-dimensional model normally applied in bibliographic sources showed that with the three-dimensional model higher strain levels and hence greater sensitivity to cracking are determined with the three-dimensional model. The applied methods and models thus make a review of such elements' design parameters during the design phase appear very promising.