Byproducts coke oven battery

Byproduct Coke Oven Battery Heating Wall Refractories—Damage and Causes of Failure... 

The ovens in a slot-type byproduct coke oven battery are separated by the heating walls. The heating walls consist of a series of vertical and separate chambers called flues. A single heating wall can have from 24 to 34 flues. A mixture of preheated air and a fuel gas is introduced into the bottom of these flues. The combustion of this mixture inside the flue heats the wall from the inside, thereby heating the ovens separated by the walls. Each flue on each wall is equipped with an observation port or inspection hole on the battery top. Through these inspection holes, the conditions inside the flue can be observed and/or measured, for example, flue temperature. A battery can have nearly any number of ovens, from as few as 30 or 40, to as many as 70 or 80. There is always one more heating wall in a battery than there are ovens in a battery. 

This premise would apply to all byproduct coke oven batteries, regardless of size or height. The greater the height of a heating wall, the less resistance to flexure. The ability of a heating wall to resist lateral pressure decreases as the inverse of the square of the wall height. In other words, a 6-m wall s ability to resist lateral force, and therefore flexure, is only about one quarter that of a 3-m wall. 

The heating walls in byproduct coke oven batteries exhibit a pattern of damage that is consistent with damage induced by flexure of the walls because of unbalanced pressures from the ovens on opposite sides of the wall. 

---