**Chenyi Xu, Zhichun Liu \*, Shicheng Wang and Wei Liu \***

School of energy and power engineering, Huazhong university of science and technology, Wuhan 430074, China; cy\_xu@hust.edu.cn (C.X.); shichengwang@hust.edu.cn (S.W.)


Received: 26 December 2018; Accepted: 21 January 2019; Published: 25 January 2019

**Abstract:** In this paper, a two-dimensional steady model is established to investigate the gas-solid heat transfer in a sinter vertical tank based on the porous media theory and the local thermal non-equilibrium model. The influences of the air flow rate, sinter flow rate, and sinter particle diameter on the gas-solid heat transfer process are investigated numerically. In addition, exergy destruction minimization is used as a new principle for heat transfer enhancement. Furthermore, a multi-objective genetic algorithm based on a Back Propagation (BP) neural network is applied to obtain a combination of each parameter for a more comprehensive performance, with the exergy destruction caused by heat transfer and the one caused by fluid flow as the two objectives. The results show that the heat dissipation and power consumption both gradually increase with an increase of the air mass flow rate. Additionally, the increase of the sinter flow rate results in a decrease of the heat dissipation and an increase of the power consumption. In addition, both heat dissipation and power consumption gradually decrease with an increase of the sinter particle diameter. For the given structure of the vertical tank, the optimal operating parameters are 2.99 kg/s, 0.61 kg/s, and 32.8 mm for the air flow rate, sinter flow rate, and sinter diameter, respectively.

**Keywords:** sinter; porous media; local thermal non-equilibrium; exergy destruction minimization; BP neural network; genetic algorithm
