Abstract: The burden charging process was experimentally studied for the gimbal distributor of pre-reduction shaft furnace of COREX 3000. The similarity criteria were derived by dimension-harmony principle, and a 1:5 scale cold model was constructed. The effect of distributor parameters on the behavior of burden charging was studied. The results showed that the chute inclination angle of the gimbal distributor has significant effect on the radial bulk density distribution. The position of minimum bulk density moves to the shaft wall with increasing the chute inclination angle. The peak value of bulk density decreases and its position moves to the shaft wall with the elevation of stock line. The chute rotation speed has little effect on the bulk density.