Sustainable Mining and Metallurgy

With the rapid development of copper smelting technology, multilance topblown continuous converting approach is applied and gradually extended. Numerical simulation of gascopper slagblister copper threephase mixing characteristics in the furnace was carried out by means of computational fluid dynamics. The influence of the furnace shape, as well as the number, position, diameter and spacing of the multilance, on the mixing intensity and stirring dead zone in the furnace were investigated. The results demonstrate that stirring dead zone and relative static region of the bath in furnace with an elliptical crosssection are reduced by 17.1% and 27.8%, respectively, compared to a furnace with a circular crosssection. The stirring dead zone in the furnace is reduced from 90.6% to 63.7% as the lance number is increased from 6 to 8. The dead zone is reduced from 63.7% to 34.7% when the lance position is reduced from 0.3m to 0.2m. The case with lance diameter of 76mm and lance spacing of 600mm have high stirring capacity of jet and low splashing intensity of molten. If lance diameter and spacing are too large, the slag splashing intensity is enhanced, which is not favorable to industrial production.