Preheat and Hopper Design for Electric ARC Furnace

Abstract

The objective is to design a hopper that utilized the radiative energy emitting from the open inlet area of the electric arc furnace to preheat the scrap metal up to some temperature. Preheating is done in various processes to reduce the power consumption and metal pre-heating can be useful depending on the available potential of energy that is being wasted. There are numerous configurations of preheaters, and one configuration is selected using decision matrix. Transient thermal analysis was done to predict the scrap temperature using ANSYS Transient Thermal Analysis, and Steady State Analysis was done to find the maximum temperature of plate and structural members. After analyzing thermally, structural members were designed having maximum distributed loading and change in temperature. Having huge temperature, cross section of beams was changed to accommodate flow of water to reduce the temperature of beams.