Study on the melting characteristics of steel scrap in molten steel

Steel scrap is of great benefit for environmental protection. In converter steelmaking, bottom carbon injection was applied to enhance the scrap ratio and in EAF steelmaking, submerged carbon powder injection was used to accelerate the smelting of scrap. In these two cases, carbon powder is directly injected into molten metal to improve the scrap melting with effective carburization capacity and intense stirring effect. In this study, the induction furnace experiments were carried out to study the melting characteristics of steel scrap with different carbon contents and bottom-blowing gas flow rates. The results show that larger carbon content and faster fluid flow can promote scrap melting because the carburizing reaction can be accelerated by larger carbon concentration gradient and the heat transfer can be enhanced by larger stirring intensity. Finally, the convective mass transfer coefficient and heat transfer coefficient between steel bar and molten metal were also calculated.