Yang Fei PhD Completion

We warmly congratulate Dr Yang Fei on the successful completion of his PhD and the award of the degree for his thesis entitled “Modeling and Simulation of Hydrogen-based Shaft Furnaces.”

At Monash, hydrogen-based shaft furnace technology is a core research area supported by Rio Tinto, CSC, and ARC. It is regarded as one of the key technologies that will enable the low-carbon transformation of the steel industry. During his PhD, Dr Yang developed an industrial-scale CFD model capable of simulating shaft furnace operation across a wide range of reducing gas conditions, from conventional reformed gas to pure hydrogen. The model incorporates a more realistic representation of reduction thermodynamics while achieving significantly improved computational efficiency.

In addition to developing an enabling modelling tool, his research highlighted the critical importance of iron ore properties in hydrogen-based direct reduction processes through numerical experiments and explored various pathways to overcome the key challenge of heat supply deficiency in this technology, from optimizing conventional gas injection conditions, through using hydrogen-nitrogen mixtures, to introducing induction heating.

Our industrial partner, Dr Tim Evans, provided comments and suggestions during model development that contributed significantly to these achievements. In Dr Yang’s thesis acknowledgement, he wrote: “I would like to thank Tim Evans, the project lead from a key industry partner, Rio Tinto. Through intermittent discussions with him, I gained a clear understanding of the industrial challenges in this field, which strongly supported the determination of my research content.”