Price Winner: Eva-Maria Wartha

Eva-Maria Wartha is a doctoral student in the Research Group for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) under the supervision of Michael Harasek. Her dissertation and her research work as project assistant is carried out at the Institute of Chemical, Environmental and Bioscience Engineering in cooperation with the Competence Center K1-Met.

The collaborative work is focusing on the blast furnace process. It is still the most important technology for pig iron production in Europe. To improve the resource efficiency within the blast furnace, an understanding of the complex phenomena inside the blast furnace is required. Eva-Maria Wartha is working on the simulation of the blast furnace to enable the application of alternative reducing agents which reduce the coke input. Her focus lies on the reaction modeling for CFD simulation to digitally depict the raceway zone in the blast furnace. Because the processes inside this zone are governed by chemical reactions, their modeling is essential for correct predictions.

Eva-Maria’s research covers on the one hand the speed-up of available reaction models, to enable their application for the industrial process. On the other hand, also the model development is covered, to include additional phenomena. Therefore, she implemented a model to include turbulence effects in the conversion of reducing agents during a research visit at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and tested it for the blast furnace application.

The Lions price enables the presentation of Eva-Maria Wartha’s work at international conferences (e.g. European Combustion Meeting).