US 9,556,497 B2Granted

Blast furnace

AssigneeMitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.

InventorsSetsuo Omoto, Keiichi Nakagawa, Tsutomu Hamada, Masakazu Sakaguchi

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Abstract

A blast furnace includes: a blast furnace body; raw material charging means for charging raw material into the blast furnace body; hot air blowing means for blowing hot air into the blast furnace body; a drying apparatus etc. for evaporating moisture in low-grade coal; a dry distillation apparatus etc. for carbonizing dried coal; a cooling apparatus etc. for cooling carbonized coal; a pulverization apparatus etc. for pulverizing the carbonized coal cooled by the cooling apparatus; a storage tank for storing powdered coal; a nitrogen gas supply source, a conveyor line and a cyclone separator etc. for conveying the powdered coal pulverized by the pulverization apparatus to the inside of the storage tank by generating a gas flow with the nitrogen gas; and an injection lance etc. for feeding the powdered coal inside the storage tank to hot air that is blown into the blast furnace body.

Claims7

Dependent claims

A method for operating a blast furnace installation comprising:

a blast furnace main unit;
raw material charging means for charging a raw material into the blast furnace main unit from a top thereof;
hot air blowing means for blowing hot air into the blast furnace main unit from a tuyere thereof;
and
pulverized coal feeding means for feeding pulverized coal into the blast furnace main unit from the tuyere, wherein
the pulverized coal feeding means is configured to:
vaporize moisture in low-rank coal with a moisture removing means;
perform pyrolysis on the coal from which the moisture is removed by the moisture removing means with a pyrolysis means;
cool the coal on which the pyrolysis is performed by the pyrolysis means with a cooling means;
pulverize the coal cooled by the cooling means with a pulverizing means;
store the coal pulverized by the pulverizing means with a storage tank;
transfer the coal pulverized by the pulverizing means with a transferring means into the storage tank with a stream of inert gas;
and
deliver the coal in the storage tank into the hot air that is being blown into the blast furnace main unit with a delivering means, wherein
the pulverized coal has an oxygen atom content ratio between 10 and 20% by weight and has an average pore size between 10 and 50 nm.

12 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.