CFD simulation of regenerative chambers in glass industry to support the design process for thermal efficiency improvement

Carlo Cravero, Davide Basso

University of Genova

Giuseppe Briasco, Mauro Carretta

Consorzio SIRE

 

The overall efficiency of a regenerative chamber for glass furnace mostly rely on the thermo-fluid dynamics of air and waste gas alternatively flowing through stacks of refractory bricks (checkers) that realize the heat recovery. A numerical approach could effectively support the design strategies in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the current technology and hopefully suggest new perspectives of improvement. A CFD approach, through Ansys-CFD commercial code, to the regenerator will be proposed here. The need for a porous domain instead of the real geometry of the checkers, and the set up of such a model, will be discussed comprehensively. Results confirm that the experimental data can be properly fitted by the calculations and in the last section of the article a few examples of applications will be presented to give the idea of how CFD could improve the overall efficiency of the chamber.

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