Improving the Energy Efficiency of Heat-Technical Equipment on the Basis of Numerical Simulation of Non-Stationary Processes

In industrial heat-technological installations for accelerated hydration of concrete, which are the main element of the thermal power system of enterprises of concrete products, the modes of heat treatment and the organization of heat supply to the product processed in them are due to the required temperature distribution in the volume of the concrete body, providing a given product quality. In order to optimize the processes occurring in such thermal device, a nonstationary mathematical model of the hardening process of the concrete product subjected to heat treatment has been developed, which allows calculating the spatial distribution of its volume temperature and degree of hydration of the active part of the cement clinker. The proposed model is based on the use of a non-stationary three-dimensional heat equation that takes into account the internal heat release due to the exothermic reaction in a concrete body and determines the degree of its hydration and hardening. For a given mode of heat treatment with the use of the finite volume method, numerical simulation of the hardening process of a symmetric concrete object of cubic shape is performed. In the selected points of the object under study, depending on the time of heat treatment, the rates of temperature change and the degree of hydration were calculated and their analysis was carried out. When analyzing the graphs of the temperature change rate, the characteristic inflections consistent with the given thermal mode of the heater were revealed. By a given mode of heat treatment of the form of “temperature rise – isothermal exposure – temperature decrease” in the selected points of the object there is an increase in temperature compared with the specified maximum temperatures of isothermal exposure, which is associated with the exothermic effect of the hydration reaction. A temperature shift relative to the specified thermal mode of the heater due to the non-equilibrium of the concrete hardening process is observed. The proposed mathematical model allows determining the time of reaching a preset temperature for any point of the internal space of the product subjected to heat treatment that can be used in the when designing of new and modernizing of existing thermal technological installations of accelerated hydration of concrete, as well as systems for automated control of the concrete hardening process in these devices. The results obtained during the study are in satisfactory agreement with the experimental data of other authors.

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