Physical and Mathematical Modeling of Metal-Slag Exchanges in Gas-Stirred Ladles

Ladle refining plays a key role in achieving the quality of the steel since in this reactor temperature and chemical composition is adjusted, elimination of non-metallic inclusions is performed, and also deoxidation and desulphurization are operations taking place in the refining process. Specifically, the metal-slag mass exchanges have not received much attention through scientific studies. In this work, a rigorous study on the mass exchange between metal and slag is presented through a scaled water physical model. In the model, thymol (playing the role of a solute such as sulfur) is added to the water (playing the role of steel) and silicon oil (playing the role of slag) picks up the thymol, while the ladle is agitated with the central injection of gas. The evolution of thymol concentration in time was measured. Also, a mathematical model was developed and cast into the commercial CFD code Fluent Ansys to represent the fluid flow phenomena and the mass transfer through the solution of the continuity equation, the turbulent momentum conservation equations and the species mass conservation equation. There is a good agreement between the measured and the computed results regarding the thymol concentration evolution in water and consequently the mathematical model was validated regarding the mass species metal-slag exchanges and it may be used to study metal-slag exchanges in the steel ladle such as deoxidation or desulphurization.