Thermal Investigation of an Indirectly Heated Rotary Kiln

Abstract

Rotary kilns are very important to the construction industry and many others. These machines are very inefficient, and this is a big concern since they rely on fossil fuels to operate. The aim of this research is to use the power of computational fluid dynamics to save costs and time to optimize the indirectly heated rotary kiln. The research will mainly focus on the thermal analysis of the rotary kiln. The significance of this research mainly lies in the ever-growing need to preserve natural resources and in this case, it is by optimizing highly inefficient machinery such rotary kilns. The numerical model study was conducted using steady state conditions and was also validated. It was found that the numerical model results deviated from experimental results by 10.63%. The optimization process was conducted where the mass flow rate of the air was varied and while the fuel flow rate was kept constant. The reverse was done where the mass flow rate of fuel was varied while the flow rate of air was kept constant. It was concluded that there exists an inverse relationship between the increase of the flow rate of air and the temperature distribution and there exists a directly proportional relationship between the increase of fuel flow rate and the temperature distribution.