Abstract: The cooling arrangement comprises spaced apart cooling tubes arranged in a frame and interconnected with metallic tie plates. For decreasing thermal stresses without loss of strength throughout the structure, each tie plate is tangentially welded with its edge portions to the adjacent cooling tubes on both the shell and the furnace sides thereof. Each tie plate may be tangentially welded to one adjacent cooling tube and to the other it may be welded on the portion of its surface defined by an arc between tangents to this arc from the location where the tie plate is tangentially welded. The cooling tubes and the tie plates may be provided with fins and, the tie plates and the fins and as well as the walls of the frame have expansion clearances or slots. The frame is filled with a refractory material serving to protect the whole cooling arrangement.

Abstract: A method of supplying a pulverized fuel mixture to blast furnace tuyeres comprises batch loading the pulverized fuel mixture into a discharging chamber 8 being under gauge pressure, and subsequent continuous distributing thereof from this chamber, and transportation along pipelines 15 to the blast furnace tuyeres by means of gas. According to the invention, after distributing the pulverized fuel mixture from the discharging chamber 8, a supplementary gas is introduced into each pipeline 15, the total flow rate of said gas exceeding that of the main gas 3 to 10 times, and the product of the total flow rate of gas within each pipelines 15 by concentration of the fuel mixture therewithin being maintained equal for all the tuyeres 16.