Conduction and convection heat transfer for aluminum ingot in preheating furnace

Aluminium is a widely used material, which is found in a number of products e.g. thin aluminium bands that is the base material in many heat exchangers. Rolling processes are used to produce these thin aluminium bands, in order to get the right properties and to get the aluminium easier to roll, heat treatment is needed. This heat treatment of aluminium ingots prior to the rolling is in focus in this work, where computational fluid dynamics and computational heat transfer techniques is used to predict the heating process in a hot air pre-heating furnace. The used approach includes steady state computational fluid dynamics simulations combined with transient computational heat transfer simulations. The simulation results in form of spatial and temporal distributed aluminium ingot temperature was compared with temperature measurement in a thermocouple prepared ingot in the actual pre-heating furnace. Simulation results correspond well with the measurements and there are small differences. Results of the described simulation approach open the possibility to predict spatial and temporal temperature distribution in these kinds of pre-heating processes.