Discrete particle simulation of burden distribution for bell-less charging system

This paper presents an experimental and numerical study related to burden distribution of blast furnace. Physical experiments of charging coke and ore from bin to container were conducted by a simplified bell-less charging model. Numerical experiments were performed by means of discrete element method (DEM) in which the gravity and contact forces between particles are considered. It was shown that the DEM model could reproduce the experimental results well. It was found that the burden surface and gouge depth were affected by the rolling friction coefficient. DEM simulations were extended to examine the conditions such as O/C, burden velocity, charging pattern, stock line in relation to the burden distribution. The burden profile and O/C distribution were analyzed in detail. Moreover, aspects such as the similarity for scale-down, particle size and so on were discussed based on the DEM results. The results suggested that the similarity could be made by keeping the same scale-down ratios related to container size, burden velocity and other key variables; and O/C distributions were affected by particle size.