Prediction of the Vanadium Content of Molten Iron in a Blast Furnace and the Optimization of Vanadium Extraction

Abstract

The vanadium content of molten iron is an important economic indicator for a vanadium–titanium magnetite smelting blast furnace, and it is of great importance in blast furnace production to be able to accurately predict it and optimize the operation of vanadium extraction. Based on the historical data of a commercial blast furnace, the clean data were obtained by processing the missing data and outlier data for data mining analysis and model development. A combined wavelet-TCN model was used to predict the vanadium content of molten iron. The average Hurst index after wavelet transform was calculated to reduce the complexity of the wavelet transform layer selection and the model computation time. The results show that compared to single models, such as LSTM, LSTM with attention, and TCN, the combined model based on wavelet-TCN (a = 5) had an improvement of about 11~17% in R2, and the prediction accuracy was high and stable, which met the practical requirements of blast furnace production. The factors affecting the vanadium content of molten iron were analyzed, and the measures to increase the vanadium content were summarized. A blast furnace should avoid increasing the titanium dioxide load, increase the vanadium load appropriately, and keep the relevant operating parameters within the appropriate range in order to achieve the optimization of vanadium extraction from molten iron.