Estimation of thermal performance of bath smelting and flash smelting furnaces with regard to their design features

To satisfy a necessity of smelters operating autogenous head smelting units to expand their resource base, the metal-containing technogenous materials are being increasingly involved in recycling. Such materials include products of slag flotation, and smelting units reverts. The aforementioned provokes major process failures and process destabilization at the head autogenous smelting units, such as flash smelting furnaces (FSF) and bath smelting furnaces. Low autogenous feed processing results in significant alterations of furnaces thermal conditions. Recovery of standard thermal conditions requires obtaining higher grade converter matte, combustion of higher amount of fuel, and higher level of blast air oxygen enrichment, which in turn complicates process control especially for flash smelting furnaces (in comparison to Vanyukov furnaces (VF)). Obviously, such difference is caused by thermal performance of the furnaces. In order to determine operational features of the furnaces while processing autogenous feed one should calculate heat balance for both processes using low autogenous feed of the same composition with regard to all heat losses measured at commercial furnaces