Modeling, Simulation, and Validation with Measurements of a Heat Recovery Hot Gas Cooling Line for Electric Arc Furnaces

Waste heat recovery has a high potential for increasing the efficiency and sustainability of electric arc furnaces. In the present work, a dynamic model of a water cooled hot gas line is presented and validated with measurements of a newly installed electric arc furnace (EAF) with a waste heat recovery system. Due to necessary reconstruction work of the EAF, the cooling pass is upgraded to a heat recovery hot gas line. With hot water from the hot gas line saturated steam can be produced and fed into the existing steam net. The heart of the system is the water cooled hot gas line which is responsible for sufficient hot gas cooling on the one hand and adequate hot water generation for the steam generators on the other hand. The water cooled hot gas line is modeled in the commercial simulation software APROS and validated with measurements of the performance test during commissioning of the heat recovery plant. The simulation results are showing an excellent agreement to the measurements. The results embody that the model is both very reliable to estimate the transient behavior of the hot gas line and able to predict the operational process conditions.