| Abstract Scope |
One of the high temperature process investigations in Virtuhcon’s (Virtual High Temperature Conversion) project is on Top Submerged Lance (TSL) technology in Freiberg, Germany. This technology is invented in the year 1970’s and since then it has been widely used in extractive metallurgy (Pyrometallurgy). The extraction of many metals such as copper, nickel, lead, zinc, tin, antimony, etc. are extracted using TSL technology. The advantages of this technology are high reaction rates, less space-time footprint, multiple functionalities (oxidation and reduction) and low installation costs.
The furnace exhibits a highly turbulent bath with high capacity for phase transition reactions during the pyrometallurgical extraction processes. Apart from various unknown measured data-, “bubbling phenomena” is the prominent one. In principle, when the combustible lance is submerged into the bath, the bubbling phenomena occurs. These bubbling influences many process parameters such as foaming, reaction kinetics, wear of lance, slag layer etc. Hence, understanding the bubbling process is an important criterion to run the TSL efficiently, but due to the aggressive TSL conditions, it is challenging to measure the bubble frequency by traditional methods.
This presentation projects a novel acoustic measurement system (developed by Outotec®), which determines the bubble frequency in a pilot-scale TSL. |