Sinter is the most important component of the blast furnace. At the moment, sintering process is the most widespread method to agglomerate the iron ore. In Asturias ArcelorMittal works as in most industrial plants, this is usually carried out in a Dwight-Lloyd machine where iron ore is sintered after a thermal treatment process. During the sintering process, a mixing of different kinds of materials is converted into an irregular, tough and porous product approximately 30 to 60 mm in diameter. This is a very complex process since there exist lots of chemical reactions occurring and it is really difficult to know what is happening within the sinter bed. Process temperature is an excellent sign of the behaviour of the sintering process. Burn-through point (BTP) is defined as the point where the temperature of the waste gas reaches its highest value. It occurs when the flame front reaches the bottom of the sinter bed. Burn-through point determination is very important in order to stabilize the process and to improve both quality and productivity. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed in order to obtain a wind boxes temperature profile in industrial sintering processes. At the moment, two sintering plants are working in ArcelorMittal Asturias. Plant A is 65.1 meters long and 4 meters wide. This plant is made up of 21 wind boxes. Plant B is 87 meters long and 3.2 meters wide. In this case, there are 23 wind boxes along the machine. Strand speed is about 2.7 and 3.6 m/s respectively and gas flow passing through the sinter bed is about 750000 Nm 3/h in both plants. Sinter production in both plants is about 5.500.000 tons of sinter product per year. Regarding the productivity, it reaches a value around 31.5 t/m 2 /24 hours as an annual average in both plants. In order to develop the mathematical sintering model, it is considered as input data the consumption of every material such as the blend of iron ore, coke, water, return fines and fluxing agents. But it is also necessary to consider the operating conditions such as strand speed, gas flow through the sinter bed, the ignition conditions and wind box thermocouples temperatures. As output variables, calculated wind box temperatures and, consequently, both BTP temperature and position are obtained.
