Abstract:
Archealogical survays undertaken since 1988 at Samanalawawa, the hilly terrain
between lowerland and centrel highlands of Sri Lanka, have revealed the evidences of
an acient Iron Smelting technology that produced high quality high carbon steel. The
winds in intermonsoon period (June-September) provided the energy requird by the
fiimances in Smanalawawa Valley.The surveys further revealed that the iron thus
produced contained 68.7% and 79.5% of ferric oxide which is equivalent to 45% and
55% of metallic iron respectively. This discovery became nationally important to Sri
Lanka. In 1996, Tabor et al. (J. Arch Sci, 32(5), p.753) carried out an archeological
survey and excavation project in Samanalawawa valley that led to a series of
experimental iron-smelting field trials. They successfully reconstructed a late-1st
millennium AD wind-powered furnace, and also did some preliminary modeling of wind
patterns using the commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package of
ANSYS. The inlet velocities were fixed at 0 km/h at ground level, 15 km/h af 0.5 m
above ground level and 30 km/h at 2 m above ground level. The temperature within the
furnace was set to 1200 °C. Further studies were required on thermo-flu ids in the
furnace. This paper addresses those aspects. Here the open source software OpenFOAM
was used in place of ANSYS for economy and versatility. The boundary conditions of
air velocity, temperature and packed-bed porosity were applied and the modeling of
combustion inside the furnace was examined. Next step is to develop a solver to analyze
the burning of charcoal that would lead to the optimization of the combustion process
and most efficient use of natural wind power in the iron smelting process.