Erosion Behavior of Blast Furnace Tuyere

This study focuses on the study of erosion pattern of Blast furnace tuyere which is a copper casted component used for injecting hot air inside the furnace to help in combustion of pulverized coal. As tuyere is operating at high adverse thermal condition; it has provision of two cooling circuits, body and nose separated by solid copper. Identification of the most vulnerable zone in tuyere has been done by scanning used tuyere for which nose cooling circuit does not get failed. This is required to get the actual information regarding erosion pattern as tuyeres changed during shutdown are generally having burnt nose and therefore no use for this study. Scanned model is compared with three dimensional model of original tuyere to find out the erosion pattern. This exercise reveals that the top part of nose front is the weakest zone and hence the maximum material loss is observed at this zone. The reason behind why this particular zone becomes the weakest part is being explained with temperature profile observed in numerical analysis.