The report focuses on the layout and features of the thermal performance of the drum-type batch furnace for heating of metal products for hardening. Technical characteristics of the furnace, some results of the thermomechanical calculation are given. The computer simulation of the processes of gas flow and heat exchange in the furnace is presented. The study has been carried out using the CAE-system (CAE, Computer Aided Engineering)—the software module ANSYS Fluent. In this module, the flow boundary conditions were specified. To check the repeatability of calculations, the control of current values and calculated temperature discrepancies has been used. The results of the simulation are presented graphically and contain a visualization of the field of temperature and velocity distribution, as well as a vector distribution of gas flow rates. The obtained results of the computer simulation allowed evaluating the efficiency of the thermal and gas-dynamic performance of the developed design of the drum-type batch furnace with a constant temperature of the operating space. The developed design of the furnace for heating of metal billets with moving of billets in the furnace along the drum allows solving of some problems of resource and energy saving; it could also be used for heat treatment of bars, pipes, strip, and bar sections of various shapes.
Keywords: batch furnace with a constant temperature of operating space, recuperative burner, computer simulation, temperature fields, velocity fields, resource saving, burning, heat exchange