Under the background of “carbon peaking” and “carbon neutralization”, the green transformation of iron and steel enterprises is imminent. The hydrogen-rich smelting technology of blast furnaces is very important for reducing energy consumption and CO₂ emission in ironmaking systems, and it is one of the important directions of green and low-carbon development of iron and steel enterprises. In this paper, the research status of the thermal state, reduction mechanism of iron-bearing burden, coke degradation behavior, and formation of the cohesive zone in various areas of blast furnace after hydrogen-rich smelting is summarized, which can make a more clear and comprehensive understanding for the effect of H₂ on blast furnace ironmaking. Meanwhile, based on the current research situation, it is proposed that the following aspects should be further studied in the hydrogen-rich smelting of blast furnaces: (1) the utilization rate of hydrogen and degree of substitution for direct reduction, (2) combustion behavior of fuel in raceway, (3) control of gas flow distribution in the blast furnace, (4) operation optimization of the blast furnace.

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.

The high-temperature simulation tests of softening and melting zone under different w (Cl ^- ) were carried out, and based on the density functional theory, the influence mechanisms of chlorine on softening and melting behaviors of BF burden were analyzed. The results show that with the increase of w (Cl ^- ) which bring in by sinter, the softening start temperature and softening end temperature of BF increase, and the softening temperature range becomes small, the melting start temperature increases, the dropping temperature decreases, the melting temperature range becomes small too. The softening and melting zone of BF narrows. With the increase of w (Cl ^- ), the maximum pressure difference and the comprehensive permeability index both decrease, the permeability of the softening and melting zone enhances. The main reason for the increase of permeability is that the chlorine atom makes the Fe-O bond length increase, the stability of the structure is destroyed, the adsorption capacity of CO molecule on FeO surface is promoted, the reducing speed of FeO increases. Although chlorine can effectively reduce the reduction degradation of sinter in the BF and improve the permeability of the softening and melting zone, the metallurgical enterprises should still eliminate or reduce the chlorine element into the BF.

The effects of the simultaneous injection of MgO and magnesite powder on the combustion of coals, properties of the primary slag, and softening-melting properties of the burden were investigated. There were four aspects to the results that we obtained. First, MgO showed catalytic activity for dehydrogenation and carboxyl group removal from coal; as a result, with increasing MgO, the combustion ratio and pyrolysis ratio of the coal investigated improved. Notably, when the content of MgO increased from 0% to 3.21%, the combustion ratio increased from 67.75% to 75.73%. Secondly, the MgO distribution in the slag sample was close to that in the standard slag after melting for 10 min. After 50 min, the difference in MgO content between the slag and standard slag samples was less than 1%. Thirdly, with an increase in the content of MgO, the short-slag feature of the slag was obvious, the viscosity fluctuated wildly, and the melting temperature increased significantly. It is proposed that the properties of the primary slag could be improved by decreasing the MgO content. Finally, with the increase in the MgO added to the burden, the softening-melting properties of the burden degraded. When the MgO content was 0.86%, Δ P _max was only 2.04 kpa, and S 59 kPa·°C. However, when the MgO content was 2.61%, Δ P _max was 20.00 kPa, and S 1349 kPa·°C. Therefore, the technology of MgO injection into tuyeres with pulverized coal was beneficial for blast furnace operation.