Tomography-based determination of the effective transport properties for iron ore sinter

In the steel smelting process, the aspects of iron ore sinter cooling has important realistic meaning for steel industry's energy saving and environmental improvement. The topology and microstructure of the porous sintered ore play an important role in determining the effective heat transfer and fluid flow properties for the cooling process of sintered bed. X-ray tomography has been applied to the investigation of the structure of iron ore sinter according to some literatures. In this work, three samples employed in industrial steel smelting process are imaged with axial μ-CT using a Skyscan X-ray scanner. From the tomographic data, we estimate some structural properties of iron ore sinter samples such as the porosity, the volume and the equivalent diameter of open and closed pores, pore-size distribution and so on. In addition, the resulting image stack of one sample is reconstructed to produce unstructured, body-fitted, tetrahedral mesh representing the solid and interstitial pore regions. The resulting mesh is then employed for direct pore-level numerical simulation (DPLS) to numerically calculate its effective transport properties-effective thermal conductivity, permeability, Dupuit-Forchheimer coefficient, and interfacial heat transfer coefficient. The effective thermal conductivity and permeability data are compared with analytical models developed for spherical particle beds. The sample is found to be anisotropic with respect to the effective thermal conductivity. The interfacial heat transfer coefficient is compared against a correlation from the literature based on experimental data obtained with spherical particle beds.