CIVS Reheating Furnace Paper Featured in Iron & Steel Technology

CIVS paper “Comparison of Slab Thermal Stresses in Methane- vs. Hydrogen-Fired Reheating Furnace Operations with Computational Fluid Dynamics” was featured in the August Issue of Iron & Steel Technology as a technical article. This paper was presented at AISTech 2025 — The Iron & Steel Technology Conference and Exposition in Nashville, TN, and published in the AISTech 2025 Conference Proceedings.

Authors of the paper include Muhammad Basil Lutfi (CIVS Graduate Research Assistant), Nick Walla (CIVS Sr. Research Engineer), Abhishek Kolakotla (CIVS Graduate Research Assistant), Armin Silaen (CIVS Associate Director for Operations), Kurt Johnson (Cleveland-Cliffs Research Engineer), and Chenn Zhou (CIVS Director).

While the effectiveness of hydrogen fuel usage for carbon emission reductions is well-known, the potential secondary effects of hydrogen usage in steel production are still a large focus of research. This article presents a computational fluid dynamics study comparing the thermal stresses in slabs reheated in methane-fired, hydrogen-fired and blended-fuel reheating furnaces. The simulations investigate the effects of different fuel types on the thermal behavior of the slabs and the resulting thermal stresses. The results provide insights on temperature distributions and thermal gradients in the slabs, as well as the associated stresses, for both methane- and hydrogen-fired operations.