Combustion and energy balance of aluminum holding furnace with bottom porous brick purging system

For acquiring the details in aluminum holding furnace with bottom porous brick purging system, efforts were performed to try to find out the potential optimal operation schemes. By adopting transient analysis scheme and constant boundary temperature, combustion in the furnace was investigated numerically using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The predicted gas temperature shows good agreement with the measured results, and the predicted energy distribution of the furnace is consistent with that obtained from energy balance experiment, which confirms the reliability of the numerical solution. The results show that as the fuel-air mixture temperature rises up from 300 K to 500 K, the energy utilization of the furnace could increase from 34.55% to 37.14%. However, as the excess air coefficient increases from 1.0 to 1.4, energy utilization drops from 34.55% to 29.56%. Increasing the combustion temperature is the most effective way to improve the energy efficiency of the furnace. High reactant temperature and medium excess air coefficient are recommended for high operation performance, and keeping the furnace jamb sealed well for avoiding leakage has to be emphasized.