Made of Steel - ArcelorMittal Optimized Sinter Cooler Charging System Using Altair EDEM®

ArcelorMittal is the world’s leading steel and mining company, with a presence in 60 countries and primary steelmaking facilities in 17 countries employing more than 190,000 people. In a recent project, a large-scale charging chute of a sinter cooler plant in Fos-Sur-Mer had to be optimized by the ArcelorMittal R&D team to improve the reliability and efficiency of this device. The objective was to identify a better and more feasible design that improved granular segregation, abrasion, and mechanical resistance. ArcelorMittal R&D used the high-performance software for granular material simulation EDEM to simulate and analyze the granular flows in the charging chute. Providing pre-calibrated material models, EDEM enabled the engineers to create and calibrate their EDEM model to match the physical experiments. The DEM simulation provided valuable insight into the granular flow in the charging chute and segregation patterns, which is difficult and sometimes impossible to measure in experiments.