Granulation performance by hybrid centrifugal-air blast technique for treatment of liquid slag

Abstract Dry centrifugal granulation technique for treatment of liquid blast furnace (BF) slag stands out by its compact structure, easy adjustability, and smaller energy consumption. It is crucial to obtain fine particle characteristics for achieving high granulation performance and then high heat recovery rate. A three-dimensional model was established in this paper to describe theparticle characteristics of liquid BF slag by new hybrid centrifugal-air blast granulation technique. The intuitive granulation evolutions, particle mass distribution, and size uniformity, were acquired as well as accumulative mass fraction. As a result, the vertical breakage effect of blast air (20 m/s) accelerated the granulation process and led to a reduction of 14–18% in particle size, with more obvious optimization effect at low disk speed. Moreover, the general prediction correlation of particles size suitable for both the hybrid centrifugal-air blast technique and the classical centrifugal granulation technique, was established to optimize the granulation performance.