Approach for Pyrolysis Gas Release Modelling and Its Potential for Enhanced Energy Efficiency of Aluminium Remelting Furnaces

Within the scope of the Advanced Metals and Processes (AMAP) research cluster in Aachen (Germany) the aluminium recycling process in melting furnaces is investigated with regard to resource and energy efficiency. When organic-contaminated material is charged into the furnace, pyrolysis gases are released as soon as the material temperature exceeds approximately 350 °C (662 °F). Those gases mainly consist of hydrocarbons, hydrogen and small fractions of other species. Thus, they are an energetic contribution to the furnace atmosphere and should be considered as such by the burner control unit in order to reduce the amount of unburnt fuel in the off-gas as well as primary energy consumption. This is achieved by post-processing data from lab-scale pyrolysis experiments in MatLab and bringing it into a format suitable for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. In this article an insight into the modelling approach and the model application in ANSYS Fluent CFD is given.