Iranian Association of Chemical Engineering (IAChE) Iranian Journal of Chemical Engineering (IJChE) 1735-5397 7 3 2010 07 01 Investigation of Temperature and Flow Fields in an Alternative Design of Industrial Cracking Furnaces Using CFD 61 73 10334 EN J. Aminian School of Chemical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Narmak, Tehran, Iran Sh. Shahhosseini School of Chemical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Narmak, Tehran, Iran M. Bayat Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI), Petroleum Refining Division, West Blvd., Azadi Sports Complex, Tehran, Iran Journal Article 2015 08 03 Enhanced design strategies in the industrial cracking furnaces are of practical interest for petrochemical industries. For such engineering purposes the exact simulation of temperature and flow fields in the furnace is mandatory. In this paper, a study was conducted to simulate 3D flue gas flow pattern and temperature field in the radiation section of an industrial cracking furnace in order to improve the design of the steam cracking furnaces, employing the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique. The steady-state Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations were solved, in a finite volume scheme for a turbulent premixed flow applying the renormalization group (RNG) version of the k<br />ε− model, together with global combustion kinetics for methane-hydrogen-air. Calculation of the Damkhöler number and optical-thickness was conducted to identify the appropriate methods for the numerical modeling of radiation and turbulence-chemistry interaction phenomena. The predicted results match the literature data quite well. The validated numerical procedure was then employed to investigate alternative design attributed to different burner locations. The alternative design resulted in a more uniform temperature profile on the reactor tubes as well as lower peak flame temperature. https://www.ijche.com/article_10334_164f4bfe061c94c60871d700d953f2f5.pdf