Case Study: BlueScope Steel achieves rapid rotary-kiln optimization and process insight with ANSYS CFX

BlueScope Steel - Customer Case Study

BlueScope Steel operates a New Zealand division producing about 650,000 tons of steel per year using four large rotary kilns and sought to understand complex kiln behavior—highly turbulent flows, combustion and reduction chemistry, heat transfer, and the formation of accretion rings that limit throughput. To address this challenge the company worked with ANSYS, using ANSYS CFX and ANSYS DesignModeler to model flow patterns, temperature and concentration contours inside the kilns.

ANSYS ran CFD simulations on a 64-bit workstation with a 2.5 million–cell mesh that converged in under 200 iterations and could be solved in a matter of hours, enabling rapid testing of geometries and operating conditions. The ANSYS results delivered detailed velocity (0–50 m/s), temperature (700–1560 °C), oxygen and CO distributions, clarified the effects of accretion rings and air flows, and provided fast, actionable feedback to plant personnel to support kiln optimization and improved production performance.

BlueScope Steel

John G. Mathieson

Manager Iron and Steelmaking Research