Case Study – Akar Kvaerner

Computer Modeling and Design of High Temperature Metallurgical Lances

Situation

A specialty chemical company had designed a triple concentric injection lance for delivery of powders into high temperature molten systems which had significant advantages over previous existing designs. However, despite these benefits, the lances were dissolving too rapidly and therefore undermining the economics of the new design. The client wanted to find a way to make the lances last longer (2X current performance).

Approach

IMPACT first analyzed existing data on the new lance design by studying wear patterns and failure modes. IMPACT then used a computational fluid dynamic software package (FLUENT) to develop a model of the lance design to predict or correlate lance operating characteristics and to establish performance curves and operating windows/modes that could be tested in a simulated commercial operating environment. IMPACT has a strong core competency in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and has worked with most of the leading CFD software packages.

Results

IMPACT’s combined expertise in metallurgical injection systems and computational modeling provided the client with an effective way to accomplish their technical goals. The model was able to provide insights into alternate operating windows that significantly increased the life of the injection lances, achieving their goal of a greater than 2X increase in lance life.