Decarbonization of steel metallurgy in primary production is an urgent necessity as global environmental concerns escalate, causing a paradigm shift in industry practices and plant flowsheets. Metallurgical processes undergo modifications, in ways that they have never been used before.

Here, we show the combined use of transport models and complex solution thermodynamics to simulate heat and mass transfer for iron ore pellets and the reducing gas stream in a shaft furnace when mixing the reducing gas with hydrogen and ammonia. To achieve this, we employ a one-dimensional finite volume model, a continuum approach for heat and mass transfer with explicit time stepping, which provides a detailed understanding of the system's dynamic behavior.

This enables integrating and optimizing specific input parameters, such as furnace specifications, kinetic parameters, properties of iron oxide and gas input streams, to support the decarbonization of steel industry.