The campaign life of a modern blast furnace is determined by the residual thickness of the refractory in the hearth. A new methodology is established to predict the inner profile of a blast furnace during operation. This methodology combines 3-D CFD model, which is used to predict the hot face temperature for a given inner profile, and a 1-D heat transfer model, which is used to predict and fine tune the inner profile. The effectiveness of this methodology has been demonstrated by its application to one blast furnace with good agreement between predicted and measured temperatures. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.