Mathematical and Experimental Investigations of Hot Metal Flow in a Blast Furnace Trough

In this study, a virtual length reduction technique is applied to develop a geometrically scaled water model of a blast furnace trough (BFT) for investigating flow in its jet impingement region. To accomplish this, both single‐phase and volume‐of‐fluid (VOF)‐based two‐phase turbulent flow models are developed in ANSYS Fluent. Computational results indicate that a virtually reduced BFT with a length of 6 m, compared to the actual length of 15.3 m in an industrial trough, is sufficient to capture the impingement region flow characteristics accurately. This approach reduces computational time and allows fabrication of a BFT water model with a reasonable geometrical scale factor of 0.4. The water model thus constructed is used to determine the adequacy and appropriateness of single‐phase and VOF‐based models in predicting flow phenomena in the BFT. It is found that, with the latter class of model, the standard k– ε turbulence model together with enhanced wall treatment on a wall‐resolved mesh can predict the impingement region flow of a trough, both in the bulk and near‐wall regions, with reasonable accuracy. In contrast, the single‐phase model fails to capture the intricacies of such flows, resulting in significant discrepancies in velocity predictions and substantial overestimation of wall shear stresses.