Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor Tour for U. S. DOE IVBF

On Monday, June 20, the IVBF project team visited Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor Blast Furnace No. 7, followed by an afternoon project discussion meeting at CIVS for the U. S. Department of Energy Integrated Virtual Blast Furnace project. The team included Dr. Jun Chen, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at PUWL; PUWL students Weixiao Shang and Antonio Barretto; Dr. Tyamo Okosun, Associate Professor at CIVS; Dr. Chen Zhou, Director of CIVS; Dr. Yongfu Zhao, Blast Furnace Expert at CIVS; and Dr. Hong Wang, Sr. Distinguished Research and Development Staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Joe Maiolo, Associate Director of Metals Research and Development at the Linde Corporation.

Tom White, Iron Producing Operations Engineer Cleveland-Cliffs Indiana Harbor, greeted the visitors at the plant and guided them through the tour. During the tour of IH7, attendees were able to visit the steel casting shop and attempt to make recordings of the casting stream. Difficulties were encountered due to overheating of the camera and electronics at the desired location, and a new design of the cooling system was required before another attempt could be made to record images at that location.

During the afternoon meeting, the project status was reviewed, and project team members discussed collaboration efforts on Reduced-Order Modeling, the Imaging Sensor design, waste plastics injection experiments at Linde’s research center, and the progress of CFD modeling on-site blast furnaces.