Análise numérica da influência de variáveis operacionais em um forno de rolos a gás na indústria de revestimento cerâmico

Abstract

Brazil is currently the 3rd country in the ranking of ceramic tile production, therefore, the production capacity of the industries is expected to increase year by year. The burning operation is one of the most important parts of the coating production process, however, it requires high energy expenditure which affects production costs. Given the phenomena that occur, the configuration and operating data of the gas roller oven, a fluid dynamic and thermal analysis can be used to optimize the process. Furthermore, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) promotes easier analysis and modeling, aiming to save time and cost, expanding the possibilities of observation when compared to a bench study. Therefore, the present work aims to numerically analyze the performance of a gas roller oven, verifying the influence of burner spacing and total flow on the process. For this, through Central Composite Planning (PCC), 25 simulations were defined and carried out using the CFD method using the free and open source software OpenFOAM v.10. Analyzing the configurations individually, the effects of the isolated increase in the input spacing variables in the pre-burning and burning sector and their total flow rates were observed, noting that the increase in the flow rate in the pre-burning was harmful to the process and the The opposite occurred with burning, as the spacings when increased were positive for the burning curve. Furthermore, when evaluating the Central Composite Planning (PCC), a significant quadratic correlation coefficient was obtained for the evaluations of the convective coefficient in the burning (0.6705) and cooling (0.7907) sectors, however, for the pre-burning region the coefficient did not reach what was expected.