Tuyereye

Introduction

Blast furnaces in steel plants are constantly striving for achieving higher efficiencies, lower operating costs, higher productivity & improved quality with more flexible use of raw material & lower energy consumption.

However, due to the harsh environment inside the furnace, it is impossible to visually observe the physical & chemical processes inside the furnace & hence the need for remote sensors for observing the blast furnace processes.

Need

With the advent of Pulverised Coal Injection (PCI), constant monitoring of the tuyeres & the raceway has become important in order to avoid tuyere blockages.

The tuyere blockages, if left unattended, lead to:

• Blowpipe, upper assembly & auxiliary equipment failure often resulting in furnace breakouts
• Inefficient blast furnace reactions
• Higher coke rate
• Thermal instability

Tata Steel has developed the Tuyereye, a vision based furnace monitoring system which can be used to observe the condition of the tuyeres online using advanced image processing techniques.

Features

• Online inspection of all tuyeres of blast furnaces through CCD cameras using image processing techniques
• Shows the thermal profile of the tuyeres indicating the temperatures, heat-zones and the blockage of the tuyeres as a percentage
• Above a threshold value of the blockage, it generates an alarm for the operator to take necessary action
• The live image and thermal profiles are retrieved in the form of movies and displayed for the selected tuyeres for live as well as historical data.
• The camera arrangement allows for both manual and automatic inspection.

Benefits

• Online monitoring of each tuyere condition using image processing techniques
• Alarm generation for blockage
• The thermal profiles of the tuyeres may give an indication of the water ingress inside the tuyeres.
• Gives an indication of the tuyeres where PCI is taking place.
• Operator can take proactive countermeasures to avoid abnormal phenomena
• Allows the operator to directly observe the peephole
• May help the operators & engineers in avoiding furnace breakouts
• High clarity & stable images
• Easy to install